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

Deathwing_sl said:

The launch and user requirement might be a bit high. For example, my senior project was an ultrasonic camera. It worked relatively well(the resolution was shit) but sure didn't make any products or launch.

I understand your viewpoint, and if I could go back and tell myself what to do differently, that might be it. But a lot of academic institutions aren't pushing "launch and users" for their projects. And a lot of students aren't thinking in that mindset. They're busy enough with a full class load and a part-time job.

IDK, I'll admit I graduated as a computer engineer, so maybe the curriculum I experienced is a bit different. But that seems like a really strict requirement for a fresh graduate.

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We rarely hire new graduates. Most people come in with 5-10 years of experience so the requirement of launch and users is a way to bypass that for exceptional candidates. This is all for client-facing consulting work...not staff aug.

Tuco_sl said:

What was it?

Mine was an automated testing application for engine controllers input/output we did for automotive company. Save an old chinese man 8 hours of work every week running manual regression tests.

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We made a wireless K9 communication system.

Brief breakdown: Dog wore one Raspberry Pi fitted with camera, microphone, earpiece, treat collar with shock/tase ability, rechargable battery, and a loud buzzer. Cop also carried a Raspberry Pi that connected to his phone. The cop could listen/watch from the dog's perspective while also able to push buttons on his smartphone app to shock the dog (control), play a loud buzz (control), speak directly to the dog (and speak to the environment through the buzz speaker), treat the dog for good behavior and record if he needed.

I wrote everything with the exception of the smart phone app. It was the craziest thing I'd ever done. Thankfully I had a 1.5 year internship writing drivers and firmware.

Edit: I also did all of the circuits and wiring except for the taser and treat collar - which did not work( thanks electrical engineer teammates).

Deathwing_sl said:

Khane, that seems like a way to cheese his requirements. "It's on the store, it 'launched'!" If that was the case, the app I created for myself to switch gvoice forwarding numbers based on wifi hotspot name would count as a delivered product.

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When companies are looking for junior level developers, if they aren't a company that throws out non degree resumes they will want to know about your work, and if they can see it you've set yourself apart. Even if it's cheesy stupid projects like what I mentioned. If you can build interesting, useful things within those websites or apps, and then talk about the how's and the why's, you'll do well interviewing.

Typically when hiring for junior positions (or at least, for myself and other hiring managers I've worked with) what the person(s) interviewing you are looking for is how trainable you are and if you'll fit in with the team. Also, if you know the basics and have a desire to learn (which goes back to the trainable part)

Speaking of the self-taught route, I'm going into game producing and want to be able to communicate with my programmers on their level (to an extent). For that I found this:http://cs50.tv/2013/fall/

Anyone wanting to get a basic level understanding might try that out. It's the intro CS course for Harvard that they make available to the public including videos of every lecture, pre-configured Linux VMware, problem sets, etc.

Tuco_sl said:

fucking lol, did you deploy this on a real dog? If so do you have a publication / video for it? I want to use it as an option for when we talk about fulfilling requirements for our small UGV projects.

If you had electrodes hooked up to a dog's brain that could teleoperate it, it would be the ultimate robot.

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I wish, unfortunately with me doing a large portion of the work the other team members didn't really pick up the slack. At the university you had to go through a lot of hoops to do any testing on animals and we were not prepared for it. On the plus side we did test it on one of our humans (in secret - he was tased).

It was about 85% finished, it still needed a housing for the RPi's. We even had an official state police K9 vest that we were fitting the RPi to. Shitty teammates.

I can probably find a write-up later. I think it's like 100 pages long.

Noodleface_sl said:

We made a wireless K9 communication system.

Brief breakdown: Dog wore one Raspberry Pi fitted with camera, microphone, earpiece, treat collar with shock/tase ability, rechargable battery, and a loud buzzer. Cop also carried a Raspberry Pi that connected to his phone. The cop could listen/watch from the dog's perspective while also able to push buttons on his smartphone app to shock the dog (control), play a loud buzz (control), speak directly to the dog (and speak to the environment through the buzz speaker), treat the dog for good behavior and record if he needed.

I wrote everything with the exception of the smart phone app. It was the craziest thing I'd ever done. Thankfully I had a 1.5 year internship writing drivers and firmware.

Edit: I also did all of the circuits and wiring except for the taser and treat collar - which did not work( thanks electrical engineer teammates).

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Why not just drive a drone around instead of the dog at this point?

Tuco_sl said:

Bro get a german shepherd and test that out in your freetime and post a vid.

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I wish, we had to give it to our customer and he owns it now. We actually had to build stuff for customers and not just purely academic.

The best I could do is my corgi......

Tenks_sl said:

Why not just drive a drone around instead of the dog at this point?

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Well sure, that's fine and all. I think this is mainly a low-cost option for out of shape cops who can't chase criminals.

Noodleface_sl said:

Well sure, that's fine and all. I think this is mainly a low-cost option for out of shape cops who can't chase criminals.

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K9 dogs are quite expensive. To get a fully trained one you are looking at a $10,000 charge at the minimum. Probably more around $15-20. They are trained to not require any level of human intervention once let off the leash and loosed onto a criminal. Generally they have one (usually meaningless to most) "stop" word once loosed which they react to immediately upon hearing it from their commander. It sounds like a cool piece of tech you made but I feel not very worthwhile to real world applications. Which I guess is the majority of senior projects.

Tenks_sl said:

K9 dogs are quite expensive. To get a fully trained one you are looking at a $10,000 charge at the minimum. Probably more around $15-20. They are trained to not require any level of human intervention once let off the leash and loosed onto a criminal. Generally they have one (usually meaningless to most) "stop" word once loosed which they react to immediately upon hearing it from their commander. It sounds like a cool piece of tech you made but I feel not very worthwhile to real world applications. Which I guess is the majority of senior projects.

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Yeah I guess, it felt useless in the end. The only plus side was our customer was the MA state police.

Khane_sl said:

I don't know those statistics exist. For your first job it's almost a certainty a degree holder will make more money (although I doubt the difference would be significant enough to cause alarm). After that, it's a completely different ball game.

Deathwing, of course there are companies that throw out resumes of candidates that don't have a degree, I've never argued that. But there is so much demand for software developers internationally that even if 50% of companies used that practice you'd still have a fairly easy time getting a job.

The statistic I'd be more interested in is # of employed developers with a degree vs # of employed developers without a degree.

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For whatever it's worth, according to Salary.com it's 7% for entry level programmers and 4% for entry level Software Engineer, and thats counting associates degrees. The other 90+% have BS/Masters/PHD. Even smaller % as you go to higher level positions.

Which does bring me to another point that hasn't really been brought up. There is a difference between a computer programmer and a software developer.engineer. The later being more involved in areas other than the coding and being part of and defining the entire lifecycle of requirements gathering,design,testing etc.

Software Developers : Occupational Outlook Handbook : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Makes this distinction too and also gives a nice overview of areas CS majors can go into besides your typical 'programmer' With web development being just 1 step above a support specialist and requiring the least amount of education. About a 20k difference in average salary between a programmer and software developer too.

This also doesn't go into all the other roles which also commonly have a CS/IS degree background like project manager, business analyst, UI designer that don't write code at all. Another interesting statistic would be how many CS majors out there actually are writing code for their job role. Higher for recent grads, but overall I wouldn't be surprised if its less than 50%.