Pretty much this. Sifting dozens of resumes wares out your patience really fast.

Hope I'm not considered lazy because I sift resumes.

Lazy isn't quite the right word for employers. They just don't have the time to really dig into every candidate.

Recruiters though, they're lazy. Seems like there are a lot of unscrupulous ones out there. Then the majority just throws
**** at the wall to see what sticks.

My company uses three recruiters for finding engineers. Two are pretty good. One brought in one of my co-workers and the other is a friend of the CEO, he's good but hasn't really worked with companies or clients that do rails stuff before so he's still narrowing down what we're looking for. The stuff he sends us keeps getting better as he gets more feedback.

The third is pure crap. Pretty much all they send us are people with master's degrees and only experience in pure java. This is in spite of our feedback that we're not interested in this type of candidate.

Anyway kind of rambling, but point is, try to find a good recruiter. See if you can get references to a couple at a meet up. A good recruiter well help you sell yourself and find somewhere that is a good fit for you and the company.

We have sprints and standup meetings = we're agile! Everything else is bull****.

"Points" is so subjective – it's completely dependent on which developer is working. Oh you have a seasoned dev that's been through multiple projects and knows how the huge myriad of backend systems, CMS, and all the layers of cruft added by hundreds of change requests over the years all fits together? 3 points. Brand new guy? Infinity points.

But let's get rid of the seasoned, talented guy who everyone loves because he costs 30% more than the new guy. The skeleton crew of grizzled lead devs we leave behind will pick up the slack. And let's hire yet another manager who doesn't do jack **** all day.

We can never ever ever look at management, or business analysts, to cut costs. Only developers and SQA where we can actually see tangible output to what they do. Who knows wtf a business analyst does? How the hell do you quantify that and try to get them to do twice as much work for the same pay? Let's just ignore that.

F kin corporations. They abhor risk like the plague but they just can't help themselves from meddling with a good thing and creating constant chaos - which I actually kind of like because it's better than boredom. But at some point it just gets too much.

A good business analyst makes the programming part almost trivial. I've been in the fortunate position to experience that first hand.

Wouldn't be surprised if the popularity of agile is at least in part due to the lack of great business analysts.

If you don't know exactly what you want and how you want to get there, you'd bloody better use agile or something similar to not get there.

The popularity of agile is in large part because its a buzz word and people think it helps make hiring developers easier. I suppose its also popular because there are a number of companies that have had really good success with it. But of course, agile is only one piece of the puzzle at those companies.

The problem is that Agile only works with good developers, business, product, and management teams. It requires a lot of hard work and trust between groups.

The only place I've had a lot of success with it is at my current job where we're a handful of people and management/business/development tasks are pretty flexible.

We've sort of given up on points. It's kind of funny because one of the big motivations of Agile is that you have to embrace change. Specs/Requirements/Product is going to change during development and so you should have a way of easily dealing with that.

But the funny part is then you have points - and they're really only useful if you have a fairly homogenous group of developers, working with a pretty static technology stack, working with pretty comparable problems, working over a relatively large amount of time (months). Which almost never happens. You start with diverse teams. People change. Technology changes. The problems you're trying to solve change.

daveT - Don't direct people to that thread. Way too verbose. But a fairly succinct version of that in a blog post, or a MUCH more condensed version of that for a cover letter, would be pretty useful, imo.

very true

this also nails it.

a good analogy is the successful business person who attributes his success to meditation, to book X, or even to the peace he finds in religion. while it may be true that he honestly feels any of those things is key to his success, or even that it *is*, that thing has a specific meaning within the context of his life, personality, and broad knowledge and experience. And it's his *interpretation* and *application* of that thing that's valuable, but that is precisely what's not transferable via books or lectures -- you'd need to mentor under the person for a significant amount of time to absorb his knowledge.

Language nit: verbose connotes excessive needless words, rambling thoughts, and a lack of unifying themes. I hope this isn't true of that post.

Long-winded? Sure.
Too long for a cover letter? Absolutely.
TL;DR? Ii guess...

Poorly written? fine.

My blog is all long-form, and people who don't care to read are perfectly capable of clicking the back button.

To be honest, I never once read a cover letter. I don't want to spend more time than I have to and I certainly don't want to read something poorly written and boring. Unsolicited cover letters are nothing but downside, IMO.

I have written a few cover-letters to companies, but I always try to respond to the job ad. Yes, this means I write a fresh one for each place I apply to. Canned cover letters are sort of a pet peeve of mine.

Under the covers, the way that regular expressions work is also among the more wonderful things in computer science. It turns out that they can conveniently be translated into finite automata. These automata are mathematically elegant, and there are astoundingly efficient algorithms for matching them against the text you’re searching. The great thing is that when you’re running an automaton, you have to look only once at each character in the text you’re trying to match. The effect is that a well-built regular expression engine can do pattern matching and selection faster than almost any custom code, even if it were written in hand-optimized assembly language. That’s beautiful.

I've always felt lacking for not knowing Regex. Started learning it and it isn't as difficult as it looks.

but these are the same

i believe you can take this in a spirit of kindness and constructiveness, since i enjoy your posts, but you are undoubtedly both verbose and long-winded (by any reasonable definition of either word) -- the daveT wall of a text is a fixture in these parts

if you doubt that, a fun project might be doing some statistical analyses of average post size of this thread. the verbosity seems to come from a place of genuine excitement, and a need for detail and accounting for different sides and pros and cons of issues, so it rarely bothers me.

Verbose:

"Yeah, unlike some other posters in this thread, I actually really like eating dried prunes."

Not verbose:

"Unlike daveT, I like dried prunes."

The first is fine for a few-sentence post, but is irritating for a longer post. It is full of needless words and fails to make a point on its own.

In my shorter posts, I'm verbose since this place is more casual, but I try my best to reduce verbosity in longer posts. I don't think there is much verbosity in that post.

I'm talking big picture, not sentence-level. You could putting Hemingway to shame with your economy and simplicity of language, but if you post a wall of text where others might post a succinct paragraph, long winded and verbose seem like appropriate descriptions to me, no matter what the quality is.

You know, gaming_mouse, when you brought this up earlier, I made a genuine effort to reduce my post-size. This involved extra editing and pondering if I should press the submit button at all. I think that my post-size in this thread decreased since then.

I did take your thoughts to heart the first time.

If the size of that post bothered you or anyone, I have nothing to say about it.

didn't bother me in the least. i don't know how i could have made it more clear that there was no annoyance or bad feeling behind my post. was just pointing something out. and if you've reduced your post size and my comments are only applicable to "old dave," then i'm sorry. i'm just not paying that close attention, honestly. anyway carry on, with walls of text or haikus. i won't be bothered either way.

Yep. Very well said.

Verbose was not chosen for any particular reason, so I wouldn't read too much into it.

I'd say cover letters are usually as valuable as anything else on a resume. Easily worth a 30 second look when doing a first pass and worth reading if the candidate seems promising. A completely generic cover letter, especially one not relevant at all to the job at hand still tells you a lot about the candidate (move on).

A good cover letter to me has a relatively job-generic section that tells me something about the candidate. Something like what they know, what they've done, what they'd like to do, etc. It then has a section that ties the stuff about them to the company/job they're applying to.

For someone like you, one of your big selling points is what you did to teach yourself useful skills. Learning through both courses and actually building ****. A cover letter is a better way to sell that than a resume, imo. A paragraph or two about that seems valuable and would probably only need slight tweaking for each job.

You "pulled a few punches" in your sufficiently honest account as opposed to being "brutally honest" in providing all the gory details. Really you sold yourself by emphasizing what they were likely to perceive as the positive aspects of your leaving your poker playing career.

It is the same for explaining why you are seeking a new position, you probably don't want to be brutally honest IE the senior developers aren't pulling their weight, management has perverted the Agile process, the pay is too low, etc. It is easy to leave that kind of stuff out and emphasize the positive aspects.

As a general comment yeah there are a fair amount of recruiters "throwing crap against the wall" so I think screening recruiters is necessary. On Agile, I have no doubt that in some orgs it is a perfect fit. In others not so much but there are a lot of excellent ideas that the Agile manifesto promotes. So yeah adopting these concepts in changing the process can be accomplished, it will often be painful in my view. Process changes take a management commitment. Ymmv on the level of management commitment at various orgs. I think a lot of orgs are just looking for an easy way to increase their level of productivity so they end up having a too low level of commitment to process change.

Reagarding points, estimation and agile I ran a strange experiment last month. My sister was moving and we got an estimate from a painter how much a complete redo of the wallpapers in the apartment would cost. Seemed a bit high so my dad and I decided to do some of the items on the invoice by ourselves and pay for the rest.

This lead to an interesting question...I had no idea how long it would take to remove all the old wallpaper (one of the items we decided we could do since it's basically grunt work). So what I did is research a decent technique for it and then using my old pomodoro timer (25 minute clock basically, I used the Pomodoro Technique for ~3 month at work to test it and gave up for no good reason) and just do one 25 minute run and see how much I could get done. After that I marked "one tomato areas" on the wall with a pencil and we used that to estimate the overall time.

Worked pretty well, turns out some rooms were harder than others (6 layers of wallpaper WTF) so we estimated each room upfront on a room by room basis after doing one run.

My main takeaway was
1) It's pretty great motivation for an otherwise dull task. Kind of great to set a goal of 6 tomatoes and go about your grunting. The small breaks in between are also very helpful to keep you motivated.
2) It was really good for estimation and my dad who had never heard about this before really got into it. Something like "had a tough workday today so I'll only do 4 tomatoes and then go back home to chill" became pretty common phrases.

tl;dr: I was pretty pleased with promodoro for tasks that I had no idea about before. I feel pretty confident now that I can tell how much this type of work should cost and how fast it should get done. Normally it's meant for mental work but using it on a project were you could literally see your progress (on the walls) was fairly interesting/eye opening.

[it's also decent to measure improvements in your technique since you can see that you got quite a bit faster towards the end]

I'd whack a colleague with something wet if he/she had a pomodoro timer going off every 25 minutes in my vicinity. Let alone the constant ticking. Ugh.

so ive now officially university with a 2.1 in computer science at a top 20 university in england but i have no idea how i go about finding a job. I kind of ****ed up not going for a graduate job through the uni.

All the jobs tend to ask for multiple criteria e.g "C# Developer - ASP NET / MVC / C# / Agile / SQL Server". Never heard of ASP net before, never done SQL server stuff so how am i expected to get a job? they all tend to be like this. Or if they ask for "must have experience in c++", are they asking for me to show a project in c++ or will they ask me a couple of questions about c++ in the interview?

I have no side projects apart from poker scripts (which cant really show off), no job experience. I dont really know what im asking, but just, any advice really?

It's better to apply for a job and not get an interview than to not apply at all.
It's better to bomb an interview completely than to not get an interview.

So I'd say you have two things to do:

1. Apply to a bunch of jobs you think are interesting/you think you could do/you meet at least some of the criteria.

2. Look at the jobs you're most interested in, figure out where you're most lacking in skills, and try to learn those skills with side projects.

Edit: General comment, not directed at you: I really can't understand being unemployed as a CS graduate in this day and age for a meaningful amount of time. There are lots of jobs out there, and even if someone is unqualified, spending 20-40 hours a week applying for jobs and improving themselves should be enough to land a somewhat decent job.

How bad is this? It's a coderbyte challenge and it doesn't pass, but I can't quite figure out why not.

Here are the instructions:

A couple of things that I see...
1) Your indentation looks off, but I don't know if that's just a copy/paste problem in your post. (the "ref = " and "vowel = " lines should be at the same level of indentation as the "for i in range" line)
2) Strings are immutable in Python, so you can't assign new values to str[i].