Whats salary range these days for v v sick programmer? Im in Austin, TX so cost of living is relatively cheap. 70k too low to start? 100k?

bout tree fiddy

sorry

old habits

In related news, has anyone here read "7 languages in 7 days" or whatever it's called? Seems like a pretty good concept. As somone that did Prolog I'm not sure it should be on the list (iirc it was)...I randomly saw it on amazon and a related book was some "Learn Lisp by writing a game" book that looked really interesting.

120k+ imo

You're talking about Land of Lisp for the game programming book. I downloaded the preview and it appears to be a pretty good piece of work. Learning how he implements a bisection search in itself was new to me and made me want to see more.

I'm sure the following review from Amazon would ruffle people's feathers:

I wonder if he'll be the guy that ports that Drupal-to-Django site to Lisp.

I have an onsite interview with a very large company this week. They want me to bring an example of some C++ code I have written and be ready to discuss it. They mentioned that the sample code should be representative of work that you have done in the past and the coding style that you are familiar with. Ok I guess. I have plenty of potential examples but not sure which examples I should use. I had about an hour interview over the phone with them and they asked me a lot of basic questions about C and C++; embedded development; general software engineering questions about project life cycles; etc. It's a position doing embedded applications but most of my work over the past several years has not been in embedded applications but I do have a lot of experience doing embedded applications. I'm leaning towards bringing some code where I developed a base class with some code that has a class derived from that base class.

Adios,

I think the idea to show a base class an one derived from it is a fantastic idea as it showcases your ability to do design and/or write APIs.

Being embedded, you might want to also show "optimized" code and present it in that context.

What area is your recent work in? Was the embedded programming experience from a job, outside, project, or school? I think 1 sample from your recent work and 1 sample related to the job (embedded project) is a good approach. It shows you are suited to the job and also versatile. They will ask questions like
- why you designed it this way?
- what were the tradeoffs in the design and implementation?
- why did you choose language X, or tool Y over the alternatives
- what was the biggest technical hurdle?
- how did you test the code? how would you find/fix a bug given the design? (include test code if you have it)
- how would you rewrite it today, given your experience?

" I'm leaning towards bringing some code where I developed a base class with some code that has a class derived from that base class."

This sounds too general. What is the context? It's better to show a complete application. If you have working code put up a website with your samples and link to it in the resume.

Is it a junior or senior position?

Bring some tests (write them if they don't exist) and pretend you wrote it test first. We had this "bring some code" evaluation process for software developers (which I came up with :P) and it was used for...
a) What's their process (i.e. basically answering these questions..."are there tests", "do they code test first", "is the code under version control")
b) How honed is their craft...coding style, how changeable is the code etc. (we basically had a couple of our guys read their code and rate it on style and style alone...we also had a sales guy with very minor coding background read the code)
c) Cleverness etc...pretty minor. Basically we just checked if the code would do what it's supposed to
---
d) We asked them to bring their laptop with the code if possible (i.e. if they have one) to check what environment they work in..which OS do they use, what tools for codeing....mainly because we did Open Source and wanted to see if they fit culturally i.e. walk the walk and use an OS toolchain

Typical questions would be..."If you were asked to add feature X to the code how would you do it" (once again process amttered).

Now this may probably not be valid for embedded C developers (since we did web based business software) just a FYI.

Senior position. They stated that the code should be non proprietary and if didn't have an example of non proprietary code write a function. So not sure how much they really want to see I guess. I am bringing my notebook on the trip. The related to the job suggestion is something that crossed my mind. I'll see what I can do. Thanks for the input.

Interesting, thanks. I think they're going to try to figure out (obviously) how I would adapt to their software development process. I have a lot of experience with that area too but I'm going to proceed cautiously because some issues tend to be "religious" in nature so I don't want to step on any toes.

Thanks for the feedback and yeah that's basically what I was thinking. In the phone interview they asked me about virtual functions and I gave them an explanation. I mentioned pure virtual functions and the interviewer was asking me why I would use them. So I'm bringing a base class where I specified some pure virtual functions and a derived class showing how and hopefully why I made them pure.

I want a .Net / C# job, I've got 6 months~ IT desk job exp (not .net/c# though), and maybe 5% of the job's I see in my area are entry level/jr. Most of them require 2+, or 5+years experience...

Also alot of them seem to want to have ppl with experience in Web Services, that I have none of. Ive read / watched a bunch of WS tutorials / youtube videos in the last 2 weeks learning them slowly though.

Shuold I bother applying for any of the 2+ year exp jobs or what? Im still a rookie at this...

Get an internship. Most jobs don't actually care about the "years of experience" as much as "what do you know how to do"

Also, aiming at a specific language, much less web development in .NET, is probably unwise. Build sample projects for yourself and play around with some tools.

Also, if web services seem hard (which is really just like serving a page/form in MVC without an actual page) then you should reconsider your field

Def apply for the 2+ year jobs. 2 years pretty much means entry level for software jobs. You can get 1-2 years experience during college (most grads accumulate that through projects, summer jobs, internships). Also remember that the requirements are often the skills for a perfect candidate. One thing I"ve learned during the software dev job search is that companies have a really hard time finding quality developers (I'm entry level, but received a high salary because of my master's degree). Start a side project asap. I gained about 2 years C++ experience in undergrad without ever taking a course on it. All through personal projects and summers. Tailor your cover letter to each company, and explain what you've done.

Yea Ive been working on a creating a blog since early Feb in .net/c#/css. The blog consists of 1 or 2 daily posts just talking about what some of the code create the blog with, some stuff I cant do, etc..

I figured Id show that to some employers with a cliff notes sheet attached of what I've done, what I want to do, errors, problems etc

Im not too worried about the WS, just saying that I'm pretty much a rookie at that now.

You fix that by posting less and writing more...

or write a bot to post to NVG and do both... actually, I'm pretty sure you could out do some of the manual posters there, and would definitely get you hired on for your first job writing something like that

Relevant to this thread...ebook is free today: http://leanpub.com/dowhatyoulove

A report back on the interview. I interviewed with 4 separate groups. The first group leader asked me about my background and he gave me some tests on my knowledge of 'C' and those test were easy. He gave me some code and asked where two tasks were using a resource and asked me where I'd place a semaphore, again easy basic question. He gave me a code example in 'C' and asked me to find the mistakes. The only mistake was replacing a value that a pointer pointed to as the statement didn't have an * in front of the pointer.

The second group was the toughest interview. Not because the questions were difficult but basically because one of the interviewers was a little hostile. I kept my cool really well and smiled a lot.

The third group I interviewed with were really nice and very professional. They went over my background a lot. They asked me quite a bit about my views on various topics in software development. They gave me a little code test that was easy enough. They told me a lot about what their needs where and the projects they were involved with. One of the guys had interviewed me over the phone.

The fourth group interviewer was very direct, very professional, and very thorough. He went over my resume and was mostly asking about my recent experience. He didn't give me a test on 'C' code but he did give me an interactive logic puzzle to solve. When he explained it I was thinking that this test was going to be easy too. I didn't want to screw it up so I took a minute before we started and kept thinking am I missing anything? The problem was easy and I solved it in very few steps (I'm sure a lot of people could).

So I guess the bottom line is that my technical knowledge is a good fit for what they need. My pay rate might be a problem I'm thinking. Since I'm a senior type I don't think they're looking for someone to just do a lot of coding. I'm not going to say where they're located but they did fly me in and of course paid for the trip and all. So I guess they're at least considered me a good candidate before the interview.

Even though they asked me to bring a code sample they really didn't look at it. I don't know what that means so who knows. We'll see if they make me an offer. I have another interview next week with another huge company. I don't have to provide any code samples though .

Cool thread.
I'm a first year CS student at UoT and want to get an internship in Toronto in the summer of second year. What kind of things should I be learning so that I can develop my portfolio?
Thanks in advance.

Well I actually have a position lined up at a very large company that I'm sure will be good. It happened this week so that's good for me too. The pay is good.

I have a phone interview scheduled in the next couple of days with another company that is also very large (it's not Microsoft). I'm going to go ahead with the interview even though I'm sure they'll never hire me. I'm doing it just to honor my commitment. I'm not going to say a lot about the interview itinerary because it would probably be fairly easy to figure out which company it is if I did. The point I'm making is that after seeing the itinerary I'm almost certain that it's not going to be a good fit but I guess I could be surprised. Believe it or not I did not seek this company out either. I'm not working with a third party recruiter. I just had my resume posted on one of the big job sites and they sent me an email asking me to apply so I did. After I saw the position they're interviewing me for I decided to send them a much more detailed account of my relevant experience as I wanted to make sure they didn't have any misconceptions about me. I stated that I had no hard feelings if they wished to cancel the interview based on the detailed account. They haven't canceled. I'm going to push back pretty hard with a lot of questions on the details of their software development process, their development environment, their tools for doing OOAD (that's what they seem to be looking for from me), metrics they use for evaluating software developer productivity, why software developers should find the company to be an excellent place for career development, etc. I guess this all construed as my having a negative attitude going in and to a certain degree that's true but I also think the questions I'll be asking are important but they don't get asked them very often.

Ask them if you can do some code maintenance. Add some features and/or fix some defects. When I first started out in software development many moons ago I picked up a lot from reviewing the code of more experienced developers. This also has a benefit of seeing how software is applied to "real world" problems and you get hands on experience in working with the development tools. I still pick things up from other developers and I'm not saying how long I've done this .

If you're just in it for a job the magic words are "I'm good with legacy code"...work on becoming good with legacy code and you are pretty much guranteed a job imo
It's probably going to be a somewhat boring job though.

I have no idea how to get better at it but I guess you could just pick 30 random OS projects on github and contribute a little bit to each (thus showing that you can get into other people's code quickly). Possibly might want to venture into disassembling etc. as well