IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

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Trump's Staff
<Gold Donor>
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The guy you interview may say it to the recruiter, then you will be fucked.

Report it, it is not an appropriate interview commentary.
 

Ao-

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
<WoW Guild Officer>
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Back to the topic... A relative of somekind works at google as an infrastructure engineer, and I mean that as software infrastructure (writes for their programming language). He talked glowingly about the QA people there. They were literally the final word on everything, and his comment was "If our QA staff said you were wrong and you didn't believe them, they sent the book to you on why you were wrong with the section highlighted". So maybe some places get it?
 
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Xarpolis

Life's a Dream
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Huge update to my story. I feel it's important, so I want to put it here for opinions.
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Friend: Going to HR over my boss' head is a bad idea. Also, going to my boss directly is bad. This division of the company is only a three person team, and my boss is one of those people. As such, there is no such thing as an anonymous comment.

Me: So you don't trust that your boss will keep it to himself unless something else happens? That way you're covered?

Friend: He can't. If he mentions anything at all to my coworker, he'll know right away that it was me that said it. Also, this is someone that I'm going to be dealing with for years, outside of work. So it's not like he'll be gone as soon as the job is over.

Me: I understand. But at the same time, he doesn't seem to have the same regard for you. He's openly tried to get you fired in the past. So he clearly doesn't give a shit that you're someone he will see for years in the future. So why should you?

Friend: It's because he doesn't have to. He has the power in this "relationship". Here's some back story. My mom doesn't work. And her welfare checks no longer covered her living arrangements, and her house was foreclosed on. This guy went out and bought it, so he's now her landlord. Until I'm able to move her somewhere else, that is. So it's a situation where either I play nice with him or she's out on the street. This guy did something vaguely similar to a friend of mine a couple years ago. He loaned him some money and then basically used that as leverage over her for years. Actually, he still may be doing it.

Me: I didn't know that at all. All the more reason to fuck this guy and get your mom out of that situation.

Friend: Rock and a hard place. The solution to that is to move her away, but I can't afford to pay for her rent and she isn't willing to work herself, and her welfare check won't cover it. So as a result, moving is off the table for now. This also means that getting out of this situation isn't an option for me.
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Ok, what does he do in this situation? Is there anything he can do? His goal is to finish school before going full time. As such, he can't afford to pay for his mom in addition to himself on his current wages. This is the same guy that I talked about before that had the job that wanted to offer him x to work full time, but he chose to go part time and complete school instead.
 

moonarchia

The Scientific Shitlord
21,330
38,752
Huge update to my story. I feel it's important, so I want to put it here for opinions.
------------------------------------------
Friend: Going to HR over my boss' head is a bad idea. Also, going to my boss directly is bad. This division of the company is only a three person team, and my boss is one of those people. As such, there is no such thing as an anonymous comment.

Me: So you don't trust that your boss will keep it to himself unless something else happens? That way you're covered?

Friend: He can't. If he mentions anything at all to my coworker, he'll know right away that it was me that said it. Also, this is someone that I'm going to be dealing with for years, outside of work. So it's not like he'll be gone as soon as the job is over.

Me: I understand. But at the same time, he doesn't seem to have the same regard for you. He's openly tried to get you fired in the past. So he clearly doesn't give a shit that you're someone he will see for years in the future. So why should you?

Friend: It's because he doesn't have to. He has the power in this "relationship". Here's some back story. My mom doesn't work. And her welfare checks no longer covered her living arrangements, and her house was foreclosed on. This guy went out and bought it, so he's now her landlord. Until I'm able to move her somewhere else, that is. So it's a situation where either I play nice with him or she's out on the street. This guy did something vaguely similar to a friend of mine a couple years ago. He loaned him some money and then basically used that as leverage over her for years. Actually, he still may be doing it.

Me: I didn't know that at all. All the more reason to fuck this guy and get your mom out of that situation.

Friend: Rock and a hard place. The solution to that is to move her away, but I can't afford to pay for her rent and she isn't willing to work herself, and her welfare check won't cover it. So as a result, moving is off the table for now. This also means that getting out of this situation isn't an option for me.
----------------------------------
Ok, what does he do in this situation? Is there anything he can do? His goal is to finish school before going full time. As such, he can't afford to pay for his mom in addition to himself on his current wages. This is the same guy that I talked about before that had the job that wanted to offer him x to work full time, but he chose to go part time and complete school instead.

Have your friend start recording all interactions he has with the toxic coworker. Get something like that last interview on tape, and blackmail the shit out of him. Mom's rent is free forever or the boss gets the tape, etc.
 

Xarpolis

Life's a Dream
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15,610
He became her landlord when the bank was foreclosing on her house. Not for generosity. Just because he could use it to his advantage.
 

Lendarios

Trump's Staff
<Gold Donor>
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Can he leave to another company? The landlord dynamic really screws up the friendship aspect.
 

Xarpolis

Life's a Dream
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15,610
Because it's his first big job. Working part time (under 20 hours a week), he's now earning more than most of the people in his shitty area of Ohio. Plus, he likes what he does. It's just that this co-worker is a mega douche. The worst thing is that he thought this guy was a friend, but nope.
 

ToeMissile

Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
<Gold Donor>
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He needs to deal with it now before shit gets worse or the possible fallout more severe. Also, assuming his mom doesn't have any medical conditions preventing work, she needs to get off her ass.
 

Jalynfane

Phank 2002
719
563
Start an internship tomorrow. First "gig" in tech. Changed industries about 8 months ago, let's see if an old dog can learn new tricks.

Doing Java at the internship is what I was told, so that is good.
 
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Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
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I did my internship much later than most, when I was 30. I fit in fine and even got s job out of it. Just be a sponge, do what you're told, and try not to be a creep weeaboo
 

Ao-

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
<WoW Guild Officer>
7,879
507
Start an internship tomorrow. First "gig" in tech. Changed industries about 8 months ago, let's see if an old dog can learn new tricks.

Doing Java at the internship is what I was told, so that is good.
We get a ton of NTS interns, and most of the time the extra experience they have makes it easy for them to transition into employees.
 

alavaz

Trakanon Raider
2,001
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Had an interview for the first job I mentioned and it was terrible. The CIO was asking most of the questions and the handful of technical people he had in the room with him looked completely defeated. The CIO just rambled on about how I was missing experience with "insert product name." Each time I would ask them what capacity they were using the aforementioned product, he'd defer to a technical zombie who would reply "not very much." The whole thing was incredibly odd to say the least. This job has been open for 3-4 months now because they want the "right person." I don't even know if I believe the numbers they were floating on salary anymore, but at this point no amount of money would get me in there.
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
19,820
13,335
I worked for a company like that briefly. Unsurprisingly it was a government contract job. The CIO was the least technical person I have ever worked with that held a tech position, and it was CIO of all things. We would actively try to keep him out of our interviewing process because he just rambled about dumb shit and threw out 10 year old buzz words. It would completely deflate the rest of us because he would talk forever. Interviews that should have been 30 minutes would go on for hours, with candidates we all knew we didn't want to hire. I remember one specific instance where he came into my office and told me about this new .NET "feature" called WCF and said he heard we should be leveraging it. This was in 2015. WCF has been around since like 2006.

The salary and benefits at that company were hard to match though so maybe they really do pay well. 401(k) was 100% vested with full matching to 7% from day 1. You also got 32 days of PTO on day 1.
 
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Palum

what Suineg set it to
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Here I am wondering what qa is

At Emc we had a dedicated firmware QA group and they were great. They ran regression testing every night that would pull any commits from master in, build the UEFI roms, flash them, and run through an automated test suite. The entire dev team got emailed the results of the previous nights test. If a bios test failed, my boss would delegate one of us (probably who did the commit) to look into the log and try to make sense of it. If it was a real issue then we'd assign it to an appropriate team member and triage.

I never felt that reviewing logs was a burden or even something I'd want QA doing. If my feature was to add bifurcation to a pcie card and the test is failing because the card is showing up with a x16 bus instead of two x8x8 busses what the hell is the QA guy gonna know about that?

I did part of my internship there working with the QA team and it was a pretty thankless job by many. Maybe working there made me appreciate it a little more.

Here our QA just makes sure tests aren't broken. It seems scary because this shit goes out to the fleet.

Do you by chance design navigation software for destroyers