120 karma · joined October 20, 2016
Personally, I like Disqus because you aren't required to log in to one specific social media account and integrating it with your site is pretty easy.
I mean, I think it's good that Georgia / Arizona State have created "meta-majors" to give students more exposition on specific majors.. but I wish high-schools would provide that information before students sign up for a 20k-40k+ / year experiment to find out they don't want to become w/e it is they originally signed up for..
When I was a sophomore in high-school, a teacher went out of her way, tapped into her network and helped me land my first professional programming gig. I was still probably going to be a programmer as I had been coding for 5+ years already, but being exposed to that environment helped re-affirm that it was the path that I wanted to take.
Yup, that's what I will do occasionally too. If the phone-call goes well, I'll invite them onsite for that coding task... no algorithms. I like being flexible with them, if they are more comfortable doing it at home due to scheduling, they can hack away at home.
>By throwing out homework assignments (which cost you 0) you are signaling either that they do not seem like a good enough prospect to be worth your time or that you simply view their time to be worth vastly less than yours.
I generally stick with working at start-ups. I need to know that the engineer I'm bringing on can handle high-pressure situations when we have to deliver milestones. Which I can totally understand why some potential employees that I've handed this assignment to become upset / flustered. But it's a good indicator if they don't complain at all and do an exceptional job, that they'll generally do well and at the very least be open to critique so they become a better engineer.
These requirements are absolutely not appropriate for more established/larger corps just as start-ups aren't for everyone.
Regardless, you're going to have to put in time unless you're already trusted by one of the seniors/leads/managers.. if that's the case then there's no coding assignment.
If you're interviewing at 20 companies concurrently you should probably not interview at so many companies at one time and narrow down who you would most likely want to work for.
2 hours is not unreasonable for a take home project with the entire internet at your disposal. People need to be motivated to join the company they're applying to! (Anything more is definitely unfair for the candidate and doesn't scale well when reviewing code)
This notion that 2 hours is a lot of time, well plenty of engineers would rather have that than waste a few months memorizing algorithms they'll rarely use. It's pretty common for algorithm tests to be an hour long anyway.
So many software engineers have it backwards. Companies don't work for you, you're not even in the door yet. Unless you're a vp or principal engineer with a stellar bg, your tasks are replicable and most employers aren't going to be drooling over to get you on board as entitled / piss-poor attitude is going to cause more friction than it's worth.
I just think it's a kind of crazy there's no one to reach out to directly if there are any negative actions that happen.
The problem I'm finding with Facebook right now is I don't want to spam everyone with science-y articles or to offend/bother people who might not care for liberal view-points.. just because there are so many people that I know that are on their network. Also, I'm too lazy to create groups to target my posts with. It ends up just being a photo-dump with maybe written posts once a month + mostly keeping brief tabs with family+friends.
When I first started on Fb, it was addicting posting things I could reference later or writing long-ish essays or being ridiculous with friends (photoshop wars).
I was referring to queries such as: User needs to get a list of pharmacies they've gone to in the past 2 months that carries x-medication. Not overly complex, but annoyingly more code that would have to be written + architected in NoSQL vs a relational db.
My job as a lead is to help scale my team, properly architect the application as well as reducing any risk / uncertainty while delivering new features to the platform.
The syntax doesn't save that much time in my personal experience. The actual amount of words that's typed might be less.. it can be cleaner than Java but if my team is spending a higher amount of time debugging Kotlin issues relative to working with the Java codebase then we've got a problem.
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> That's a... surprisingly uninformed statement from a "lead" developer.
That's a... surprisingly snarky / unhelpful remark with no counter to my statement.
I'm a lead Android developer and I've inherited a Kotlin codebase mixed with Java, and here's why I refuse to create any new classes in Kotlin:
1). Compile-time is slow. I know there are plenty of work-arounds but I don't want to modify the build-properties to the point where it's hard to replicate when onboarding new engineers. The closer to the default-project settings, the better and the less resistance. Android dev itself is a very fragile framework to begin with.
2). Abuse with nullable types. I've been a lead iOS engineer too and this is what I have observed as well with Swift. I can't even count the amount of Crashlytic reports that have been caused by a model not binding properly.
3). It really doesn't save that much time at the end of the day. A language is a language is a language.
4). Community/docs does not have as much reach as Java in terms of docs.
This speaks more to the previous developer than the language itself, but this has been the most unstable code-base I've ever worked with.
I specifically avoid web-development for the bandwagoning hype when the shiniest new piece of tech comes out. While I think it's great that Jetbrains is trying to make a competitive language to Java, I think there are too many forces working against them.
Java's old, boring and predictable, but that makes it a great language to a build a stable app with.
Their server is throwing a 500 error
It's just ridiculously clear they don't have the consumer's best interest.