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Ask HN: What startups use C and Python?

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Re: Ask HN: What startups use C and Python?

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SevOne's careers page says that a Bachelor's degree is a requirement. How strict is SevOne (or any other company, for that matter) on this requirement? Do you know of any software engineers that don't have a degree?

> SevOne's careers page says that a Bachelor's degree is a requirement Don't let this stop you. Every. If you honestly think you have the skills for the job after reading the description, seek it out. Let them determine if you are right for the position. Don't be the no in your life.

> Don't be the no in your life.

That's some wonderful advice - thanks for sharing!

Re: Ask HN: What startups use C and Python?

#32
post #6

The company I work for uses C and PHP mainly , but as our platform is Gentoo that also makes us users of python. I also write most of the utility scripts I use in python. http://sevone.com

SevOne's careers page says that a Bachelor's degree is a requirement. How strict is SevOne (or any other company, for that matter) on this requirement? Do you know of any software engineers that don't have a degree?

there are lots of engineers who are at SevOne that don't have degrees. Send me an E-mail and we can talk about it. we are always looking for talent regardless of their background.

Re: Ask HN: What startups use C and Python?

#33

Repustate.com Our machine learning code is in C and accessed from Python via Cython.

did you write the libraries yourself? is it libsvm with a python wrapper? I'm curious

Definitely influenced by a few existing libraries (libsvm, svmlight etc.) but ultimately custom built to really ramp up performance and scaling. Our customers throw the Twitter firehose at us, so we need to be able to analyze data quickly.

Re: Ask HN: What startups use C and Python?

#35

Don't pigeonhole yourself by languages you want to use. Interestingness of work is not correlated with language very much.

Agreed. When I'm hiring developers, when they tell me they only want to work in certain languages, it's almost always a red flag in terms of their overall problem-solving ability. Just my experience though.

Re: Ask HN: What startups use C and Python?

#36
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SevOne's careers page says that a Bachelor's degree is a requirement. How strict is SevOne (or any other company, for that matter) on this requirement? Do you know of any software engineers that don't have a degree?

Loads of software engineers don't have a degree.

true. you don't need a degree to be an excellent software engineer, but you do need to understand CS fundamentals. although not a guarantee a degree helps you learn them, but if you're smart there's no obstacle of learning them on your own.

Re: Ask HN: What startups use C and Python?

#37

Don't pigeonhole yourself by languages you want to use. Interestingness of work is not correlated with language very much.

Good advice in general, but if C and Python are the only languages that he currently knows, getting a job at a company that uses them might be much easier than convincing an employer that he could quickly learn Ruby or Haskell.

Re: Ask HN: What startups use C and Python?

#38
post #9

Enthought - www.enthought.com We are the scipy/numpy folks and use Python/C to solve interesting scientific / engineering problems. I have been writing interesting Python C extensions for the last six months.

Python and C (maybe C++ more than C) are very popular in scientific programming. In the fields I know something about (crystallography, bioinformatics, molecular dynamics simulations) probably the majority of projects that started in this century is in C++ and Python.

Consider interesting, underpaid academic jobs for programmers. There is a good chance that your software will make a bigger difference to the world than in a startup.

Re: Ask HN: What startups use C and Python?

#39

Don't pigeonhole yourself by languages you want to use. Interestingness of work is not correlated with language very much.

Agreed. When I'm hiring developers, when they tell me they only want to work in certain languages, it's almost always a red flag in terms of their overall problem-solving ability. Just my experience though.

What about if they say they are only fluent in certain languages at the moment while having a basic knowledge in the languages that you use? Do you look more for ability to solve computer science and discrete math problems?
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