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

lendarios_sl said:

Wait. doing a 6 page site is not a great project.

If she is doing amasterprogram, it is expected she already knows how to program. If not then she is doing a acceleratedbachelordegree.
What is she doing?
I may have misunderstood what you are looking for.

There is no better way of learning than actually solving practical problems, and putting the ass hours on the chair and typing code.

Also there is always pluralsight for any specific topic.

Click to expand...

If I had not said "accelerated master's" would it have changed your answer? In this case, accelerated master's is a combined bachelor's and masters and assumes you start from scratch. So, it was basically get a bachelor in four years or get a bachelor's and masters in four years. Seemed like a no brainer to go the combo route, especially when some companies will give you a pay bump just for having it. However, that does mean less classes overall, so she's trying to supplement the programming knowledge (as this accelerated degree program tends to be more theory than practice).

I really wanted to go for my master's right out of school, but at the same time I also wanted to work. I might try to get it at night one day, but right now with the kid I don't want to miss anything he does by being at school all night. The plus side is MIT is literally right across the street from us (literally the other side of the street), so I could always see what they offer.

That said, I think a master's in computer engineering is a different beast than computer science, probably more attractive in my case.

Masters of most engineering professions is more attractive than bachelor's. I have literally never seen a job I was applying for even mention a masters as a plus. But then again I guess I don't apply for like data scientist or theoretical application jobs.

If you apply for one of the big 4 I bet it is really attractive

Thats true. I think for a little while Google required Masters education. Not sure if they backed off on that or not. From what I understand a ton of Google's hiring practices have been a swing and a miss which is why they're currently struggling a bit. Mainly because hiring is just a crapshoot and when you start putting all these artificial restrictions it becomes harder and harder to find actual good candidates. Honestly if I was hiring a developer I'd be cautious if they're overly academic. First hand knowledge is that academic coding teaches you almost nothing about writing actual production level code, debugging production and all the normal day-to-day stuff. Very little of my day is working on data structures, data modeling or writing neat and clean algorithms. But that may also be because I'm just an everyday corporate developer.

From what I know about google's hiring practice is it can take months and upwards of 8 interviews along with coding exams and everything - my friend went through it and now works there, and the way he detailed it basically turned me off from ever applying. If anything, I think this will make a lot of people not want to go through it - who wants to waste 3 months and then not get hired?

I've also heard people who interview at Google like to jerk themselves off a ton about how they work at Google. I've heard similar things to interviewing at Valve.

I kind of think the Master's thing is bullshit, too. A lot of the Indians at work have Masters and it doesn't matter. Usually whatever they focused on doesn't even relate to what they're doing in a job. But, in large corporations, it's another box to check. Where I work I think it's an instant $3-5K extra upon hire, so that really has a long term effect if you don't job switch.

Also, fuck Valve and their horizontal hierarchy. They haven't made anything cool in a long time and Enhanced Steam is 10 times better than regular Steam. I remember reading their manual once and I can easily see how it is that nothing truly substantial seems to get done.

That is one aspect of programming I love. The jobs are more about "What have you done and what can you do?" instead of some education BS like getting an MBA and horseshit like that.

I think at this point I'd get a masters just for personal accomplishment sake (if fully funded of course), it wouldn't add anything to my career or pay.

My job is so nontraditional anyways, I don't think anything academic could help me.

TJT_sl said:

Yeah Master's are bullshit. Average Master's degree will cost you 30-40k at most public schools. Even ones that cater to working professional programs. Even if you get an instantaneous 5k raise. Its going to take you years to realize a gain from that. It would still take 2+ years to realize a gain if you instantly got a 20k raise and didn't change your lifestyle at all/lived beneath your means. Company I work for will pay for some of a Masters, but not enough to entice me.

Certifications can get you better offers potentially and are drastically cheaper. Newer shit like Udacity.Com is definitely something to look into as those programs were designed by the big tech companies to teach you exactly what they want their associate developer's to be capable of and only cost like $400.

Click to expand...

I've never seen a case where a master's has given someone knowledge to perform a task they could not before.

Unless you are working on a hard-science problem which directly relates to your masters thesis I see zero benefit outside of fuckwats who want to work for Defense Contractors or the Government (where Masters is required for promotion because arbitrary)

I know MQs aren't considered sexy but RabbitMQ is amazing. I have some down time so I'm trying to teach myself Spring MVC 4+ since I lack almost any knowledge of modern web development and also Rabbit. So far I have a little webapp up where a user registers, saves to a Mongo and they can push messages via the front end into an exchange server set up via Rabbit off a queue based on their user-id. Overall it was a pretty easy experiment even if I find Spring MVC framework to still be a tad magical in how it all works. But that is a pretty common thing with Spring where shit just happens and I don't fully understand it.

I have a MS in CS, pretty sure it got me my breakthrough job due to the preferences of my boss at the time.

Tenks_sl said:

I know MQs aren't considered sexy but RabbitMQ is amazing. I have some down time so I'm trying to teach myself Spring MVC 4+ since I lack almost any knowledge of modern web development and also Rabbit. So far I have a little webapp up where a user registers, saves to a Mongo and they can push messages via the front end into an exchange server set up via Rabbit off a queue based on their user-id. Overall it was a pretty easy experiment even if I find Spring MVC framework to still be a tad magical in how it all works. But that is a pretty common thing with Spring where shit just happens and I don't fully understand it.

Click to expand...

Rabbit is kind of going out of style lately, Kafka is the defacto on many new builds due to scalability/resilience. Honestly most new architectures should be built around the queue with it being the "source of truth" with multiple data layers and applications ingesting from it. One stack I am seeing a TON of lately (biased but hey big efforts for sure) is the SMACK stack which is Spark, Mesos, Akka, Cassandra, Kafka, also see a TON of Kafka/Spark/Cassandra trios.

CnCGOD_sl said:

Rabbit is kind of going out of style lately, Kafka is the defacto on many new builds due to scalability/resilience.

Click to expand...

People are using Kafka even when they're not plugged into the ecosystem? We're using Kafka here to consume HBase updates via Flume but I didn't think anyone would use it to simply queue up requests in a SOA based environment. It doesn't even interface directly with JMS. I'd also say Rabbit is pretty resilient. It won't push the same capacity as Kafka but that goes without saying. Can Kafka do RPC/callback queues?

We are no longer relying on the vendor for bios modifications.. it is now on me again