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

Asshat wormie

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I am curious. When things like what Noodle and Moon say happen, at what point do you demand a raise?
 

Deathwing

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Depends on the company. The places I've worked, when team shuffling or downsizes(as in, layoffs) occur, you will get stonewalled asking for more money. Usually a better idea to look for a new job.
 

Vinen

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I am curious. When things like what Noodle and Moon say happen, at what point do you demand a raise?
You find a new job.

He lives in the Boston area so he should have no issue finding a new (better paying) job in the area if he is even remotely competent.
 

Noodleface

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I'm still a software engineer 1, and while I feel confident in my skills that's all people are going to look at.

I like learning new stuff, and the stuff I'm taking on is interesting - but it's frustrating as fuck trying to figure it out with nothing but vague comments to go on.

We had layoffs awhile ago, and now we're transitioning them to the next big thing - I'm sure Vinen knows exactly what I'm talking about. It's like we've got tunnel vision for CI
 

Vinen

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I'm still a software engineer 1, and while I feel confident in my skills that's all people are going to look at.

I like learning new stuff, and the stuff I'm taking on is interesting - but it's frustrating as fuck trying to figure it out with nothing but vague comments to go on.

We had layoffs awhile ago, and now we're transitioning them to the next big thing - I'm sure Vinen knows exactly what I'm talking about. It's like we've got tunnel vision for CI
My product is the front-end for the CI/SDDC. You know it...
 

Obtenor_sl

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I'm still a software engineer 1, and while I feel confident in my skills that's all people are going to look at.

I like learning new stuff, and the stuff I'm taking on is interesting - but it's frustrating as fuck trying to figure it out with nothing but vague comments to go on.

We had layoffs awhile ago, and now we're transitioning them to the next big thing - I'm sure Vinen knows exactly what I'm talking about. It's like we've got tunnel vision for CI
What languages you do/know?

My company's HQ is in Cambridge/Boston. We are looking for a lot of smart talented SEI/II folks. We're in IT Security.
 

Vinen

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What languages you do/know?

My company's HQ is in Cambridge/Boston. We are looking for a lot of smart talented SEI/II folks. We're in IT Security.
Looking for any Senior/Principal level =p

//Wish I wasn't golden handcuffed... would leave my job in an instant.

VMware/EMC/Pivotel have a lot of shit going on they need to fix. Paul Maritz was a god awful CEO for VMware. All he did was milk ESX for a couple of years while not forcing any actual change to the rest of the organization.
 

Obtenor_sl

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Oh we do have tons of Lead/Seniors open. We got some good seed round and had a great sales year last year so we're expanding massively.

We do Java, Python and Ruby in most locations (we have 4 products), and the Sr positions are for any group, so core in products or say automation with Chef and the like.

Austin, Boston/Cambridge, LA and even positions in Belfast, NI if you want to move to a city in Europe.
 

Cad

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I'm still a software engineer 1, and while I feel confident in my skills that's all people are going to look at.

I like learning new stuff, and the stuff I'm taking on is interesting - but it's frustrating as fuck trying to figure it out with nothing but vague comments to go on.

We had layoffs awhile ago, and now we're transitioning them to the next big thing - I'm sure Vinen knows exactly what I'm talking about. It's like we've got tunnel vision for CI
Don't let your title stop you. I came on to a project with Accenture as generic programmer guy_01, about 2 years out of school, and they were all idiots and just started telling them what to do and became the de facto team lead within 2 weeks. After 3 months on that project Director level guys at accenture were calling me for design decisions. I was literally googling shit in between meetings so I'd sound like I knew what I was talking about.

Get away from big companies and get into places where they need guys who get shit done. Be a guy who gets shit done. Get a reputation for this and you'll start getting on jobs that pay commensurately.
 

Prime_sl

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Looking for advice. ~5 years out of school with a BSEE. Finishing up my MS in communication/DSP while working full time and will be done this December. I currently work for a defense contractor and it is quite boring/lowish pay (~80s in LA while my 2 friends that do SW are making 95k&115k in LA/SF). After doing EE/Systems Engineering for the past 5 years, I've discovered it really isn't for me and although the grass is always greener, CS seems to have higher pay, better job security/options, and I think I would enjoy it. I have a decent CS background from AP CS in high school and I'm quite proficient at MATLAB but besides that I don't have too much software experience. Once I finish my degree this winter I'd really like to transition into SW but I'm not sure how realistic that is.

Anyone else transition from engineering to SW? I assume Python would be the closest language to MATLAB but are there other languages that I should look into? Anyone learn SW development on their own and have tips? I have the basics down but when I start to look at some more advanced code I quickly get over my head.
 

Vinen

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Don't let your title stop you. I came on to a project with Accenture as generic programmer guy_01, about 2 years out of school, and they were all idiots and just started telling them what to do and became the de facto team lead within 2 weeks. After 3 months on that project Director level guys at accenture were calling me for design decisions. I was literally googling shit in between meetings so I'd sound like I knew what I was talking about.

Get away from big companies and get into places where they need guys who get shit done. Be a guy who gets shit done. Get a reputation for this and you'll start getting on jobs that pay commensurately.
Consulting /eww

That said, this is excellent advice while working at any company.
 

moontayle

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Don't let your title stop you. I came on to a project with Accenture as generic programmer guy_01, about 2 years out of school, and they were all idiots and just started telling them what to do and became the de facto team lead within 2 weeks. After 3 months on that project Director level guys at accenture were calling me for design decisions. I was literally googling shit in between meetings so I'd sound like I knew what I was talking about.

Get away from big companies and get into places where they need guys who get shit done. Be a guy who gets shit done. Get a reputation for this and you'll start getting on jobs that pay commensurately.
Thanks for this.

Quick question. What's the best way to broach an organizational change in the way things are done? I ask because this place uses an antiquated VCS (SourceSafe) and I think they'd benefit immensely from shifting to something like Git. Being the junior guy with extremely little experience, I'm wary about suggesting such a thing without lining up my ducks, so to speak.
 

Noodleface

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What languages you do/know?

My company's HQ is in Cambridge/Boston. We are looking for a lot of smart talented SEI/II folks. We're in IT Security.
I mainly work in C/C++/ASM (BIOS/Firmware in general). I know those plus Python, VBS (ew), and probably a bunch of random shit. My most well-known are definitely C/C++

That said, moving to a new job would need to be done fairly smoothly and the pay would have to be competitive. With a kid and a house I am on a tight rope right now
 

Deathwing

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Looking for advice. ~5 years out of school with a BSEE. Finishing up my MS in communication/DSP while working full time and will be done this December. I currently work for a defense contractor and it is quite boring/lowish pay (~80s in LA while my 2 friends that do SW are making 95k&115k in LA/SF). After doing EE/Systems Engineering for the past 5 years, I've discovered it really isn't for me and although the grass is always greener, CS seems to have higher pay, better job security/options, and I think I would enjoy it. I have a decent CS background from AP CS in high school and I'm quite proficient at MATLAB but besides that I don't have too much software experience. Once I finish my degree this winter I'd really like to transition into SW but I'm not sure how realistic that is.

Anyone else transition from engineering to SW? I assume Python would be the closest language to MATLAB but are there other languages that I should look into? Anyone learn SW development on their own and have tips? I have the basics down but when I start to look at some more advanced code I quickly get over my head.
I have a BS in Computer Engineering. I agree with your stipulation about job security. Anything directly related to hardware seems closely tied to market trends and consumer whims. Of course, any industry would experience this, but it seems especially punishing in computer hardware.

I've worked in test engineering for private companies for most of the last 10 years. Last March, I started a new job, test engineer(surprise!), for a software company. I did have some years of experience with C and Java, so that helped as I have seen them flat out disqualify candidates with no experience in C(we do static analysis). But I would say my pedantic assholery is what got me the job. It's good to be a nitpicker if your job is to find bugs.

Any software interview will likely quiz you on skills by giving code snippets and asking you what it will do. Or giving you a scenario and ask you to code a solution to it. My favorite from my last round was 'what would this do?'

So, you are going to have know some coding skills, but probably not as much as you think you will. If you current job doesn't exercise those skills(most of mine did), you'll likely have to work on open source project or such. Starting with Python is a good choice. It's a very verbose language, so it's easy to pickup and understand. I've heard Ruby is similar, but I've never used it. From there, you might want to learn some Java or C# to teach yourself some of the stuff Python hides away.
 

Noodleface

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I had that dude in my interviews that printed out a page of assembly code and asked me to step through it..
frown.png
 

Deathwing

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Most of the coding during my last set of interviews was done on my computer at home. It was timed but I could use whatever resources I wanted to solve the problem.
 

Tuco

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Good thing about doing timed coding tests at home is you can weed out people without wasting your employees time.

Deathwing, is the answer to your question, "instantiates three elements of that class on the heap, calls their constructor, then deletes the three instances?"
 

Asshat wormie

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Deathwing, is the answer to your question, "instantiates three elements of that class on the heap, calls their constructor, then deletes the three instances?"
I am not deathwing but i am going to go with "nope"