11–20 of 65 posts
I've worked with plenty of people who suck at coding. Being good at coding doesn't seem to be a prerequisite.
Are there any other areas you are passionate about? Particular industries that you may have more knowledge than the average coder? Having inside knowledge of an industry can help make-up for lack-luster coding skills. For example, I work in bioinformatics and the coding problems I face day-to-day are by no means insanely difficult. If you have a decent grasp of biology, many people would love to employ you as a bioin…
Domain knowledge is pretty useful in programming.
Coding is simply translating human language into computer language. Having some other domain that interests you is pretty helpful. I was into {cars, music, movies, video games, comics, architecture, sports, etc}. I studied and took the exam for Real Estate sales.
After a company I worked at had a security incident, I studied up and started applying my weekend time towards HackerOne (freelance security penetration testing) -- that helped me land a job at a security software company.
You don't need to know a a whole lot to do corporate dev. You just need to be agreeable and friendly. Keep applying. One more thing - it'd help to include how long you've been out of school, how many interviews you've been on, where, etc. Right now you're in crybaby mode, masked as 'give me advice'. What you're really asking for is some sympathy from strangers. Software dev is one of the easiest fields to get a job -…
Full disclosure: I was a psychology graduate.
I did a PhD, learned and loved stats (and R) and discovered that coding/development was kinda fun. Now I have a job with a well-known tech company doing data science.
But still, it would have been way easier if I'd gotten a degree in computer science. No PhD (and years of poverty) and I'd probably have a bunch more money.
But yeah, you should focus on what you can do, not what you (feel you) can't.
Are there any other areas you are passionate about? Particular industries that you may have more knowledge than the average coder? Having inside knowledge of an industry can help make-up for lack-luster coding skills. For example, I work in bioinformatics and the coding problems I face day-to-day are by no means insanely difficult. If you have a decent grasp of biology, many people would love to employ you as a bioin…
Do you have any rec's for places to look for bioinformatics positions?
I worked with people even less skilled. Java/.NET folks "programming" through clicking around and drag and dropping things in Eclipse/Visual Studio. Test folks with no idea on how to do any automation or even how to setup/configure a freaking Jenkins ("manual" testers). HackerRank/Codility is a very narrow specialization of computer science - dynamic programming. Pity that such narrow domain has become the benchmark…
Seems like you are taking your interview rejections to heart. Don't do that. Most companies go with the mode don't hire unless the candidate is a great fit, because they don't want to bear the cost of a mistake. I have failed a decent number of interviews, some on technical ground, some on personal ground. I still think I am not a bad programmer, despite the failed interviews. Like you I also have doubts about my abi…
Remember that interviewing is both a negotiation and is highly subjective. If you do well, but aren't a great fit for the open req, you may find a new req is created for you. Follow up with HR if you get rejected for a position to see if there are any other positions that might be a good fit. Ask HR if they have any constructive criticism from the interviews.
Some interviewers will suck. Walk it off. I've been berated and given backhanded compliments by interviewers. You need to evaluate what you did in the interview and what you could have done better. Sometimes your effort will simply not make a difference -- you will need to learn to accept that. A mentor in the industry and your college employment office should be able to help you hone these skills and develop some new soft skills (the things that employers look for but don't show up as line items on resumes). Sometimes you just need confidence and you can get that by practice. Nobody likes rejections, but at least they come with practice.
Ask your interviewer what you could have done better. You may not get a satisfactory answer (interviewers and companies may create liabilities or violate policies by answering those kinds of questions), but it can't hurt to ask. I will spend a little more time than most interviewers to try and coax out anecdotes which show initiative and grit. These don't necessarily have to be coding related -- they are attributes of people, not only of coders. If those anecdotes aren't prepared by the interviewer, I politely suggest that those things are great to open with.
Programming is largely about learning on the job and less about memorizing APIs. I want someone who truly wants to work at the same company (is at least somewhat passionate about what we do), wants to row in mostly the same direction (or at least get to the same destination), who is humble enough to want to improve their skills, and who takes the initiative to fix issues before they become problems.
If you can improve your next interview by learning from a previous mistake, do it. Certainly brush up on data structures and algos before you interview. This will require knowing which one to use in a given scenario. If you interview for a Python position, know how the language compares+contrasts to languages you know. Spend at least a little time rewriting code into Python. Open the REPL and play around. Look at Rosetta Code[1] to compare a chunk of code in a language you know and your target language. Do some "code golf" (see HackerRank section) in the new language.
When you code on websites like HackerRank, make sure you iterate. Just because you completed a task doesn't mean that's an optimal way to solve it. Revisit tasks you have solved and try to optimize them. Try to find out how others have optimized them.
Build a small, real world project, and compare along the way to other good examples of the project. As small as Tic-Tac-Toe or a (nice) todo list app. As you build it you will learn a) best practices and b) what "good" code looks like. Your code will begin to merge with the style of the good during this project and will rub off on the next project you choose. Eventually you can do a green field project where there is…
This is great advice.
When hiring we are usually looking for "T-shaped" [0] skill sets which you haven't developed at this point in your career. But it starts with self-motivation and some sort of itch you need or want to scratch.
You can also contribute to other open source projects and those can appear on your github profile - code, tests, docs, tooling, resources/graphics, etc. Getting your commit accepted will normally allow you to go through some kind of review - especially on more active projects. Find something interesting with helpful committers. Lots of projects have 'need help' tags in their issue tracker.
[0] http://www.hrzone.com/hr-glossary/what-are-t-shaped-skills
That's subjective and is up to you. I don't see any reason anything you've mentioned necessarily disqualifies you from a programming job.
It seems like you are taking the rejection from the VP to heart. Consider something else -- they decided to interview you knowing that Python was in the req and wasn't on your resume. Either the VP is disappointed at HR wasting his time or he was willing to give you a chance. If it was the latter, what could you have done to impress him / show some competency in the required field? Could you have offered to study the language and do an interview homework assignment? Could you have played up your current programming skills? Did you have enough time to learn the basics of the language before the interview?
> I spent a year working on an ecommerce site ... I never had to use design patterns nor data structures. I just pieced it together.
You built a project! Focus on the positive. Even better if you did it by yourself and on your own initiative (not as part of a class project). Unless you installed turn-key software, it certainly did require data structures (arrays, queues, hash tables / associative arrays / dicts) and algorithms (sorting, database lookups). Most basic web work only uses a very few vanilla ones. Unless you've already optimized it, you can probably find a way to do multiple things in parallel or batch some DB queries and then highlight that. Web sites frequently can benefit from memoization or caching. There are TONS of tricks for serving web pages faster[1].
There's a world of security-related topics surrounding ecommerce / web sites (XSS, SQLi, clickjacking, etc). There's also web fundamentals that I question interviewees (http protocol, auth, sessions, cookies).
> I passed all the shown test cases, the final results showed that I got the following scores 13%/95%/0%
Would you feel more or less competent if that 0% score was a bug on their end? Consider both forks of the decision tree. Consider the likelihood of each. Do something about it. Try to tweak your submission and iterate. Or focus on a different tool. Try "code golf" on HackerRank or try math problems on Project Euler.
[1] https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/c...