Did you guys watch or have you seen that Expert sketch I posted? It's amazing. Nails corporate dev life to a T.

Two months ago I started the first real world job I ever had, got it after the first application I ever sent anywhere, too, only did the poker / affiliating thing before and taught myself "programming" over the last two years.

Man I couldn't have lucked out, more. I work at a small company that provides services for offline and online shops and everything is ****ing awesome!

Except for the pay, but the boss agreed to raise my wage every three months if I progress, and he just told me the first raise will come this month already... I started basically from nothing and I can already say I'm an integral part of the team, I've already released small features on my own and am involved in big projects too, asides from the daily business. Super nice co workers and management, they actually listen to my input on big decisions, too. No time tracking, can come and go as I please within reason and can also do home office whenever I want (yes, I work far too many hours but it's still fun to me and I feel grinding it out as hard as I can is my best course of action right now).

I don't want to brag; I'm not a good programmer by any means and suffering from imposter syndrome daily. Just want to encourage any lurkers / wannabe poker retirees to give this programming thing a try, I know reading this thread years back has had an influence on me to pick up this hobby and now it looks like I'm actually starting a career in this field.

****'s unbelievable - thanks guys.

As a late entrant programmer as well, I should probably read this every time im being a whiny *****

I got my programming career started at 36. Beats 12 tabling 50NL thats for sure.

Love both of these. I've been called an "expert" and it's highly disconcerting to put it lightly. Something about remote work does give you a bit of an angel shine, I guess.

I saw that one a while ago and then watched it just now.

I can't relate, sry.



congrats, that's pretty awesome.

I just started my first real world job in over a decade as well, but all is not roses for me as it is for Mr. Europa.

It's actually just an internship--I'm in school for a Post-Bachelor in CS, and after not getting the few dev-related positions I interviewed for, I jumped on this opportunity because I was eager (perhaps overly so) to get an internship. So far it's been all manual QA work and I believe that is mostly what I will be doing for the remaining 3.5 months. The only benefits I see are: 1) it at least gives me some relevant employment history on my resume and 2) I get lots of exposure (albeit indirect) to the development process.

My goal is to become a software dev, and I'm worried that having 4 months away from coding is going to slow down my progress in some ways. Ideally I'd find time to work on side projects and CTCI questions outside of work time, but so far I have no desire to look at a computer screen after 8+ hours of doing so every day.

Does anyone have any tips/advice on how to make the most of this experience?

I have no personal experience, but one thing that worked well for people I know that did make the jump from QA to developer is that they looked for easy opportunities to automate and script manual work they were doing. They made their own opportunities to do workplace programming.

Describe an O(n log n) time method for determining if two sets, A and B, of n points in the plane can be separated by a line.

umm, ****. this one has me stumped.

all we've learned is methods for finding convex hull of a set of points. Maybe find the convex hull of both sets, and see if either one intersects? no idea how i'd do that in actual code but it's the best i have

Jesus Christ. I hate it when people build **** like this and use no common sense.

The people in the politics thread think Government software is like Google or Facebook or something.... This is probably only a handful of versions from a green screen interface...

my first thought when i saw the headline was that it was something like that

Coordinate transform all points to minimize the new x values in one set, if all x values in the other set are then > the first set there's your line. Basically rotate the plane until you can draw a vertical line between the sets. If no rotation accomplishes this then there's no line separating the sets. That should be an O(n) solution though so maybe not what the problem had in mind, or maybe it doesn't even work for some reason I haven't thought of yet. But that's where I'd start after thinking about it for a few mins.

^^^ previous solution has some flaws as originally conceived but I still think you can use coordinate transformations as a key. There should exist some rotation that makes all Ax values < c and all Bx values > c, although the value of c will be difficult and maybe impractical to calculate. So instead you can take the transformation function for two points and figure out the range of values where Ax' < Bx'. A single function is valid from 0-2pi but one compare cuts the range down to 1pi. It gets a bit trickier after that, there are dumb algorithms that should be able to solve in O(n^2) time from there, and even some efficient algorithms could hit n^2 in extreme cases, but there's likely an n*log n solution in there somewhere.

Do this.

have you talked to the people you work with, your manager/mentor? how do they divy out dev work? ask for a story card or small dev task that you can work on.

are you close to any devs? ask them for a task or some of their work. if not, ask if you can shadow a dev for a few hours or a day and then work from there and see if they will throw you some work.

but it sounds like you really will need to suck it up and spend a bit of time outside of work. just start small, with like 2 hrs a week or something. maybe you will get engrossed in something and it wont feel like work. I would suggest react (or angular) with redux. pluralsight has some good vids. you can build an app with the pluralsigh tutorial and then you add features to it on your own.

Take this with a grain of salt, but I don't really like it when someone starts asking for extra work outside of their role before they've proven they can do their role.

So, my first piece of advice is to always make sure you're good at doing the job you've been hired to do. Then branch out.

I think thats why "automate something that's manual" is a good strategy. First you demonstrate you can do your job really well and really efficiently and then you've got a good argument for why you want to branch out more and learn more.

If your QA job is making you unable to work on being a dev out of hours, quit. Today.

I actually disagree pretty strongly with part of what jj said there.

If someone is in a role they don't enjoy, and would much rather start working toward a different one that is more desirable, I want to know that the second they feel that way. Then I can get them working toward that goal and eliminate a ton of the worst issues there are in employing people and ultimately that will increase turnover and make your company worse.

If it's a role like manual QA that is designed for literally anyone to be able to be competent, waiting for them to "prove" themselves just adds an arbitrary amount of time to their progression, and your company's progression.

One of the reasons startups are so successful in crushing legacy companies is because they eliminate these arbitrary time gates.

The whole concept of "proving yourself" in this context is just completely broken and wrong imo.

This is subtly different than what I think we were talking about. I want to know that too - but the advice was for someone within a few weeks to start asking for work that expands their role.

Sure, definitely. But again, I'm not going to start giving a new hire work that isn't in their role until I know they're even capable of doing their current role.


I disagree with this premise of why startups are successful. It has nothing to do with eliminating 'arbitrary time gates'. People can move up the career ladder quickly in startups BECAUSE they prove themselves and get rewarded with more work. Not because they just want to move up.

And people that get hired to do a role and then don't do that role because they're too busy looking for something better - aren't helping startups either.

Startups are successful for infinite reasons, one reason is the faster movement both horizontally and vertically within the company. The whole "proving it in a lesser role" is an arbitrary timegate no matter what you want to call it.

I'm not sure why you are insinuating that OP "just wants to move up", I may be coming to this discussion being much more optimistic about OP's capabilities.

Obviously newbies who suck at their job aren't who I am talking about here.

But generally the concept of needing to prove yourself before doing something different you would be better at is ancient.

If I went to you as my manager and you said "I understand LL, but let's see you perform well in QA before we discuss potential dev tasks" I'm g-o-n-e.

LL, I think he context here is someone hired in the qa role and who has been working for only a couple of weeks.

If they thought he could do the dev role they’d have hired him for it or they don’t need that role right now.

It’s not an arbitrary time gate to hire someone and see if that works out in any fashion before immediately moving them up in responsibility.

If you came to me 2 weeks after being hired demanding more responsibility or you’d leave - I’d just say bye. Who needs that ****.

2 weeks is nothing, anyone wanting a new role after that amount of time is way over confident, ridiculously impatient or a big newb, none of which is a good look on a new hire.

LL, what do you do when it seems a guy is only interested in a job as a stepping stone to something better at the company? You still need people to pick up the phones, etc., so do you reject super ambitious and smart people for that job? Or do you just hire the best at every position and accept that they'll try to move away from the low-level jobs after a month into it? Consider that when you're hiring for that step-up job, you have a better candidate pool to select from.

Hire the best at every position and accept they will view their entry role as a stepping stone and try to move past it.

I kinda think you meant to direct that at JJ tho, since obviously that's the type of situation I'm arguing for.

Probably something that needs to be made really clear during the hiring process. Most places are going to expect a certain time in position before you start moving around. The startup I worked at would give you more responsibility more often than changing your title for a new role...