rt2016

I would absolutely prefer to not have to individually tag photos with high-level tags, but my limited search of desktop programs didn't surface any that were capable of machine vision to do it for me. I should have considered cloud solutions too, thanks for the suggestion!

I'll check that out, thanks! I have an entry level DSLR (18MP) so I was hesitant to Google Photos due to the compression, but the features look great. I didn't realize the machine vision for search and tagging was all included in the price/free for compressed pictures It's probably cheaper to pay for Google Drive space than pay for Lightroom, so it's probably worth it.

One followup question, since the browser is cloud-based, have you experienced significant latency viewing your photos? For example, when I use the Dropbox webapp it takes a couple to load thumbnail previews for a folder of 200ish photos while Finder on my Mac does it basically instantaneously.

Seems like it's documented here that there's a difference in referral bonus between the Basic and Pro accounts (https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/200). Maybe you had earned 6.5GB in referrals on your Pro account, which has now been reduced by 3.25GB. It's frustrating that they're taking away the benefits you earned while paying for the Pro account, but it's not unusual.

I have limited experience compared to many people on here, but 30% for a seed round seems higher than average. It might make more sense to go straight to a series A where you will likely get more money than a seed round (expanding abroad is always more expensive than you think). I don't know which county you're in, but many (if not most) U.S. investors will be wary of investing in a company where 50% has already been given away, making it difficult to raise more money later. Exceptions are made if you're doing incredibly well and they're guaranteed to make money, but on average it's not something they like.

Why is a twitter something a programmer needs to do?

No worries, just hope some of it helped.

Regarding teaching yourself programming, that's always a good idea. There are enough people who get programming jobs out of college with unrelated degrees so it's definitely not just outliers, but still not close to the norm either. I just wasn't sure what you meant by basic knowledge, but from what you describe you could easily teach yourself, though I would expect it to take some time.

If you can wait anywhere from 1-6 months and are willing to study programming like it's your job for that time I'd wager you could learn enough to get a job as a programmer. In 1 month you can target the skills toward a particular type of position (ex. Ruby on Rails, Node.js, iOS, Android, etc.) and given longer time you could study more core computer science concepts (system design, security, more advanced algorithm analysis, etc.)

If time is in short supply, then you should try to look into companies where software QA/testing can be a transition to a programmer. In this case you could work in QA for 6 months while building stronger coding skills and then transition pretty smoothly.

However, given that programming interviews are so variable and usually stick to fundamental data structures or puzzles, there's a good chance you could find a programming job with your background. In that case, go for it, the pay will be better for sure. Expect to work quite hard the first year as you catch up.

TL;DR anything is possible, don't let my limited experience steer you too much

The accepted answer on this post has quite a bit of information: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/121653/create...

I was interested in this too at one point in time and spent some time perusing the links in the above post, but after taking the database class at my university I realized it wasn't for me. :P

Best of luck!

You may be in a little bit of a tough spot trying to get into the big tech companies with that GPA but I still think there are plenty of options when you start to look at smaller companies in areas of the country that are not Silicon Valley. I'll give you my opinion as a semi-recent grad working in tech.

- Depending on what you mean by "basic programming and CS skills", it may be hard to find a programming job other than an internship. Unless you are in an environment that makes heavy use of math-based languages like MATLAB, R, or Mathematica where you can rely on your math background, most employers will want to see more experience before hiring you as a programmer.

- Software Q/A testing or IT support may be your best bet given your prior experience in IT support and some familiarity with programming. Software Q/A testing can actually be quite interesting and will definitely pay around (or more) than what you're looking for. I would try to look with smaller tech companies that do niche enterprise software, they're quite flexible and open. The best thing about software QA/testing is that you have a very predictable work schedule and won't have to take work home or be called in at odd hours.

- Business analyst is also a good option, but again you may have to settle for smaller or lower-tier companies in the short term as GPA is of unexpectedly large importance for that position.

I would wait it out and look for a true software engineer position somewhere else. With a BS from a top school, startup and management experience under your belt you should be a solid candidate for software or product management jobs and shouldn't have to settle for support engineer.

From what I've gathered a support engineer is a combination between a QA engineer and an applications engineer, both of which are considered to be way less technical than a SWE. You likely wouldn't be responsible for new feature development at all as a support engineer.

In general they're not on the same ladder, so it's not a natural transition from support to software engineer. Like you mentioned, you'll have to settle for quite a bit of a pay difference, which will still exist if you transition within the same company. However, if it's absolutely your only way of getting your foot in the door at this company and you're set on working there, it may be something to consider.

After the initial package with the standard vesting schedule, everything else is flexible and at the discretion of management (almost always the C-suite and Board of Directors). You can try to negotiate and it may work depending on the company policies and the stage of the company. Some more established startups will have a defined policy for this to make everything uniform among employees while young companies are super flexible.

I'm guessing it's because of the hipster culture that prioritizes natural ingredients and healthy choices. Either that, or it's cheaper than more famous brands.

Slack, and even good old-fashioned email, are pretty helpful for quick shares. If you're looking for something more persistent, there's a lack of great solutions at the moment.

A lot of it is for historical reasons, CS basically developed as the intersection of 2 disciplines - EE and math.

Back when computers were large electrical behemoths they took a ton of hardware/electrical skills to program and use. Then, when higher-level programming started becoming popular (languages like B and C, etc.) universities started offering classes in programming out of the EE departments since there weren't enough programming classes to create a new department for CS.

On the other hand, there were many mathematicians from the late 1800s through the 1950s who were developing mathematical algorithms before "computers" were widely used. Many of these algorithms are now widely used by computer scientists and programmers to solve incredibly complex problems.

Currently there are two main "flavors" of CS. Some universities like UC Berkeley and MIT maintain joint EE and CS departments while others like Stanford and Harvard have CS departments that are more closely related to math.

TL; DR: it comes from the history of how CS developed out of EE (computing machines) and math (algorithms).

I think it's mostly because real data science for deep insights or research-type work is actually difficult. The term "data scientist" has been watered down recently, it used to be reserved for those who developed the new statistical learning algorithms rather than just opened a machine learning toolbox like Weka or scikit. In general that requires a PhD or at least an M.S. in one of those fields with significant experience.

I think they'll IPO. Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are already way invested in their own cloud storage platforms to change their infrastructure and nobody else has the cash.

What a troll...

I don't have time to actively trade so I settled to buy shares in an actively managed mutual fund. I did the same research on the portfolio of the fund as I would have done on individual company stocks - looking at past performance, the makeup of the fund, industry performance, and investor websites. I use Investor's Business Daily as a more impartial source, it's just numbers without much "insight".

One good thing is that the mutual fund has automatic diversification within a particular industry and if you buy shares in multiple funds you get diversification across multiple industries. Another good thing is that the shares of mutual funds are often $100-200 each while the shares of individual companies (ex. google) can be $700 just for one. Using a "high-tech sector" mutual fund allows me to benefit from the growth of multiple companies (goole, apple, intel, facebook, microsoft, intel, etc.) while not having to own separate shares of each of them.

I don't think being at a startup is what I would consider "financial security". There's still 2 years until the stock vests, and even then it may be worth less than if OP had left and worked another job for 2 years. But I agree with your sentiment, it's better to be happier and have a more fulfilling job if you can afford it.

This. Trends change so fast that even if you write the best book of it's kind it may be irrelevant in the next year. Talk about why this paradigm is fundamentally different. Now that developers have to worry less about server provisioning, capacity constraints etc. why is that important? What flexibility and capabilities do we have now that we didn't before?

Yikes, that's pretty low for local development work. If you were mostly doing remote access to a more powerful development server that might work but for doing anything more serious you'll want to consider at least 8GB. Chrome uses a gig by itself so you're already down quite a bit. Most of my dev machines have been 16GB minimum.

It also depends on what part of the country you're looking at. If you're in the SF Bay Area 150k+ within range of entry level jobs for software grads. If you're in the Midwest or East Coast (not finance) 150k+ could mean a decade of experience.

I was just about to say the same thing but you beat me to it. :) I think the choice of language is much less important than what you're doing. Even a "non-sexy" (but incredibly important) job like build/deployment engineer writing mostly shell scripts and Python automation could net you a 200k+ income

It depends on the type of company you're talking with. In my experience the recruiters at large, established companies will be very professional and positive - they're looking to make the company attractive to you as much as you want to seem attractive to them. On the other hand my experience with smaller, less-well known, companies (including many startups) is very variable. The recruiters there have significantly less training (if any) and aren't given clear requirements from management on what candidates to look for. More specific to your questions, it's not uncommon for this type of recruiter to pull a bait-and-switch on things like salary, title, etc. To me that's a warning signal that they're trying to get you to commit and then pull a fast one. By the time you get hired you'll be demoted to junior engineer with low salary, given that the recruiter was talking about their team so highly and will say that you're less experienced in comparison. It's happened to me several times, but that doesn't make it right. You're absolutely right in thinking it was crazy and out of line. My personal advice to you would be to walk away, their behavior is not a good sign of things to come.