191–200 of 230 posts
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I'm a student and I'm thinking about taking a year off from college (a CS degree) and explore the world of startups. US is out of option leaving with some European country. I've heard Germany has a very vibrant software industry. Can you please give a little more information about heading over to Germany?
Think about Slovenia too... very vibrant start-up community here, English is a standard too.
Despite having written tens of thousands of lines of open source code, I have yet to have an interviewer who has looked at that code and asked me about it.
My last interview at the company I'm at now went somewhat like this: "Your CV looks fine, we wouldn't care if you're an axe murderer, now what would you like to do/tackle?". Should have been a warning sign: interesting company to be at.
I once learned a shocking lesson about the influence of my preconceptions when I accidentally took a developer through three rounds of interviews because he previously worked for Pivotal Labs and had a German (aka technical) accent. It wasn't until the third interview that I asked him to write an algorithm to sort an array and when he couldn't I suggested instead writing an algorithm to see whether the array was alre…
I haven't written code to sort an array in nearly two decades of professional experience:) I've been lucky enough to work on some pretty non-trivial problems as well. If you asked me to do it, I could probably crank out some sort of bubble-sort (maybe). It's not to say I haven't sorted arrays, I certainly have, but whatever standard library I'm using almost always does it for me... and pretty damn well at the same ti…
The spare time issue is an interesting one. One one side we have companies saying that they look for programmers who are working on projects after they get off work and on weekends. On the other side we have companies having employees sign a contract claiming that everything they do 24/7 belongs to the company. Often both sides are the same company. It's not an issue for me only because I work for my own firm, someth…
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Erm... why did they fire you?
I've wondered about that myself. I wanted to stay, I liked it there. But it's like many relationships in life, if both parties don't want it, it won't pan out. Edit: I also had to take time off for studies and I suspect they really wanted all-hands-on-deck.
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Someone who opts-in to #3 is not necessarily desperate. In fact, to the contrary, they likely also want an opportunity to feel the company out and be more confident in their choice to stay/leave at the end of 3mo.
That "opportunity" is not worth having no company-provided health insurance, nor is it worth paying both halves of the FICA tax, except for the desperate.
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Then you're looking for contracts from the wrong kinds of companies; standard rates for most folks with a decent amount of experience start around $100/hr, more for short contracts, maybe a little less for longer ones or preferred repeat clients.
Again, I wonder what technology areas. Having looked, off and on, for C++ contract positions, I never see anything that high, in the SF area or elsewhere. Of course, my typical search involves Dice and Craigslist. Perhaps there's a better method of finding lucrative contracts.
I worked for a German startup too and our main problem was not vetting interviewees but finding people who want to interview at all. In the five year history of the company I think only one single person was hired who was not already friends with someone at the company. Other people just never applied. I remember manning the booth at one of those college campus events and it was very lonely. I probably talked to thre…
Wow here in Australia we get HUNDREDS of people lining up to interview for every job we advertise.
People apply for jobs without skills, without hobbies involving development, without experience and without even looking at the website.
I simply don't understand it... Are they hoping to get employed to twiddle their thumbs? Do they think they can pick it up on the fly?