liquidcool

There was a big ad campaign from the diamond cartel to make everyone believe that 3 months of (gross) salary was the standard amount to pay for an engagement ring. That means if you only make $36K/year, you still shell out $9K for a ring. I don't know how many bought into it, but it likely did raise the average amount paid by anchoring the price so high. "That's crazy! Maybe half that..."

It was that way in the US for a very long time. Sometime in the last couple decades a new trend arose to wear both the engagement ring and a wedding band together. The logic being you spent 4-5 figures on beautiful jewelry, so it's silly to only wear it during the engagement. (Whether it's silly to spend that much in the first place is another argument.) I don't know if they are in fashion currently, but many jewelers began selling engagement rings with a paired wedding band that is designed to match perfectly and be fused with the engagement ring after the wedding.

Absolutely not. I hire engineers, for myself and others, and the last thing I want to know is how old you are. Are they insane? I can't think of an easier way to set yourself up for an age discrimination lawsuit.

Also, for third party recruiting, I've never asked for anything related to an SSN. The hiring company may ask for that for a background check, if it is contingent on an offer, but not from me.

I'm wondering if this another situation where the recruiter is not in the country the job is in, because someone wanted to pay pennies on the dollar.

What state? Employment law varies considerably from state to state, and I didn't think that's federal law (but IANAL).

I've discovered a high percentage of recruiters think "full stack" is a thing on its own, and if you ask them which stack they don't know what you mean. "Um... the full one? I also hear a lot about stack overflow, maybe that's what they want. Also, pancakes... I'll have to get back to you."

OLAP/MOLAP/ROLAP are interesting technologies to BI folks. Companies say they want to do more BI/analytics, and DBAs/BI managers see an opportunity to get experience with some cool tech, so they say that's the correct path. Now they've got it, even if some indexes and query tuning on a regular DB would have been fine, and want someone who can support it.

And if you think OLAP is unnecessary, you should see how many devs brought in Hadoop unnecessarily.

In this market, 1 year. Update your LinkedIn profile and see who contacts you. People with good resumes get contacted 6 months after taking a job, just in case they don't like it, or it's a contract.

That article was written by Mark Suster, smart guy, but he's in startups. Losing a key person from a startup is more painful than most companies.

I suggest you start looking now, because to be honest, that bad office environment you describe is becoming very common. You may have a longer search to find a place with cubicles or private offices. In the meantime, buy over the ear hearing protection to block out the noise and discourage interruptions.

Also, wake up an hour early to work on your job search and learn new things. If you wait until the end of the day, you won't have the energy.

To your point, this sounds a little like the recent post from someone who said they were being interviewed (at Google) for a Director role. When he posted the questions, it was revealed they were really interviewing him for an SRE position, and that Google often won't tell you what you're interviewing for.

I give a talk on programmer productivity a few times a year, and measuring it (related to this) is very hard. That said, there are a few things worth keeping an eye on.

The biggest is turnover. Are people quitting because of workload or general dissatisfaction? Turnover is crazy expensive (I should know, I'm in staffing.)

You have others related to technical debt, which is what you get when people are overworked.

- Estimate accuracy (estimate vs. actual). Are you increasingly surprised at how long things take?

- average hours per issue (not great, but worth keeping an eye on)

This assumes you've got good practices like issue tracking, estimates, etc.

What aptitude are you trying to test for? Do you already have a code base in Java you might use for inspiration? You mention framework doesn't matter, but the difference in what you can accomplish in 15 minutes is significant if you're comparing, say, core Java EE and Grails.

Agree with brudgers that 15 minutes is short. You're going to need a fill in the blanks type of assignment, where they import a project into their favorite IDE and can just add methods to a skeleton class. This means you need to test importing/running in at least Eclipse and IntelliJ, and maybe a regular text editor (Emacs/VIM/Sublime) with a simple build/deploy/test script (Maven or Gradle).

In other words, you have to factor away all the time sucking annoyance associated with spinning up a project you haven't touched before.

This is a hard problem, would be interested in discussing it further with you.

I'm a developer/manager who does recruiting, but mostly in SoCal, and I see you're in the Bay area. Up there, you might reach out to Aline Lerner. She did the same, although I understand she is now focused on interviewing.io. Still, wouldn't hurt to ask her:

http://blog.alinelerner.com/about/

Another way to do it is go on Indeed at look at relevant job postings from recruiters that are well written. I find I can tell right away when they are useless; it's clearly cut/paste straight from the client and has a total "job shop" feel.

I don't know if you'll get an honest answer, but another good sign is that they have direct contact with the hiring manager.

Feel free to reach out, happy to answer any questions.

Well, I've written my own career course for developers, but two notable books include:

https://smile.amazon.com/Smart-Gets-Things-Done-Technical/dp...

https://smile.amazon.com/Work-Rules-Insights-Inside-Transfor...

It's important to note that in most cases, it's not the recruiter rejecting you, but the hiring manager. The recruiter collects some info, and passes you on to the hiring manager with their notes. The manager will decide who - out of everyone who has applied or been actively recruited - to interview. So most likely it's your resume and your competition that will keep you from getting interviewed. Your job is essentially to help the recruiter sell you to the hiring manager by pointing out how relevant your background is, because they really can't tell. And yes, it does vary quite a bit from company to company.

The other thing that will get you an interview? Letting them know about other companies you're interviewing with and offers on the table.

The short answer is that you want to structure your resume and cover letter to show authority and career progression. Clearly you're a generalist, which is not a good place to be early in your career. If you're personable with experience at a consulting firm, you might be a good candidate for a solutions engineer, which are notoriously hard to fill.

You also seem to be using the word "domain" referring to tech and not industry. But you may have experience in healthcare or something that the right company will value. You didn't include any links to your LinkedIn profile or resume, which you probably want to add ASAP since you're looking for a job :-) That also greatly limits the advice you will get.

My long answer is here: http://madeupname.com/careercourse/

Don't worry, it's free, no spam, unsubscribe, etc.

I agree with Gibbon. Will add that a real problem with young developers is that their desire to please short circuits taking the best path for their career. You end up staying longer than you should; I was certainly guilty of this. HPE does not care about your future nearly as much as you do.

I'll add that in the legal world of HR, the company changing your job function is a big deal, and nobody will blame you for simply trying to get back on course. The company screwed up, not you.

Plus, you're in SV, you have a lot of opportunities up there.

Here you go, someone got this for me as a gift many years ago:

https://www.pamperedchef.com/shop/Outdoor/BBQ+Tools/BBQ+Turn...

I used it quite a bit, but just as a spatula. Very sturdy.

Yes, I do the same and it's a real slog. I feel I get replies from some people I normally wouldn't have - top folks. But most messages are ignored, even highly personal, friendly, relevant messages to people I'm connected to through a friend. I haven't given up on this strategy, but would definitely like to find ways to make it more effective. Even if they just clicked the LinkedIn "Not interested" auto response, that'd be an improvement.

Seems like we have a lot in common, I'm also a Java guy (run largest JUG in SoCal) and am recently in staffing. Maybe there's room for collaboration? Contact info in profile.

Either way, I'm also in the planning phases and for sure I'm going with Typescript. It's getting a lot of praise from both Java and JS developers and works with both Angular and React (although that does seem to favor ES6). In fact I just spoke with a startup that moved from Coffeescript to Typescript and React.

I am leaning toward Angular 2, but mostly because Angular is about twice as large as React in the overall job market. The HN job market is tiny subset of that, so take that into consideration. It may change, but it's a huge lead. It's also written in Typescript, so it's Google + MS, and Google is using it for their big, external facing projects. My guess is that it will retain it's lead for at least a year, but both will be popular for a long time.

No, it is not at all common. The expectation is you'll at least have a few years as a lead. You're going to have to move to a company with room for growth and get promoted.

If you want to stay technical, go with a non-enterprise software company. Anywhere from Google to a tech startup. If you want to get more managerial, pick anywhere else.

I wrote about this in much more depth here:

http://www.madeupname.com/management-the-final-frontier/

Whatever you want your next job title to be.

First, this didn't stop me from inviting the applicant to discuss her work/knowledge relevant to the job. She did not respond.

Second, it's totally possible I misunderstood something. I do run the largest JUG in SoCal, so I'm not a complete Java noob. But in truth the last few years have been Groovy, and I'm not close to being a FT coder. I don't claim to be a Java expert.

However :-) You are assuming these were static inner classes, and they weren't inner/nested at all. These were multiple top level classes in one file. I can see how maybe you'd do that for composition, and I did it once to get around a wrinkle in Grails, but this really seemed unnecessary. They weren't short classes. This person was a masters candidate and had little production experience, and the whole thing came off as rushed and sloppy. Frankly, seeing all those ~ files because there was no gitignore bothered me more.

Depends on the job. Some considerations:

- your intent: playing around to learn, creating something serious, contributing to OSS, etc.

- how far you got

- who is using it?

- solo or collaboration

- how production ready is this?

I suppose you could sum that up with one question: "Where is this on the spectrum between homework and a real product?"

This falls into the topic of side projects, and I wrote about that in detail here:

http://www.madeupname.com/truth-about-side-projects/

I do, but I'm an outlier. I have a CS degree and 20 years of software experience, so I'll actually look at your code and if I know that language, take a look at your style. I've seen someone check all her Emacs autosave (~) files into Github. And unnecessarily jam multiple classes into one file. That was a bad sign.

All but a handful of recruiters will not because they simply don't understand any of that. They don't understand whats on the resume or job description. Better ones will take note of those things and pass them along to the hiring manager, who should take a look. But it's best if you link them in your resume.

Here's my comprehensive write-up on resumes, I think this is what you are looking for:

http://www.madeupname.com/optimize-developer-career/resume-t...

Interesting, this is like a TSA pre-check program for coders. The main benefit, I assume, is that the exam is proctored and your identity verified.

If not, then there is no value to this. I've already run across someone who said they were sent to a testing site, Googled the answers and got a perfect score. They didn't get the job, but the coding test was not the reason. So if you could guarantee against cheating, that would be an advantage.

I'd say sites like interviewing.io and Pramp sort of do that already.

I do recruiting (3rd party). This sounds like total shenanigans. I would be actively afraid to ask for your SSN and definitely DOB - they should be avoiding asking your age out of fear of discrimination lawsuits. What's reasonable on a call:

- name (they don't need your middle)

- email, phone, Skype (if they do video tech interviews), experience

- asking if you are legally allowed to work in the US without sponsorship. For a defense job, if you are a citizen. You don't want to waste your time if you're not.

Depending on the job, before your on-site interview a major corp. might ask for your full name, DOB, felony convictions (not arrests), etc. for a background check, but I don't think they'd need your SSN until you're there for employee orientation (tax purposes, etc.).

I've never advertised on Monster, but if you're a recruiting agency, wouldn't you think twice about doing so now that it's owned by a competitor?

This is the same reason Pepsi spun off YUM brands. Coke converted Pepsi restaurant customers by asking how they felt about giving money to KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut.

Not the poster, but as some IQ tests have been proven to discriminate against protected classes, this may be an opening for a discrimination lawsuit. Effectiveness of the lawsuit might vary from state to state. IANAL.

That sounds tough. To be honest, I don't know how a plan of taking the job you want while studying to be competent at it on the side would be possible for anyone.

I'm also confused why you don't just transfer to another school with the credits you have. You wouldn't be starting from zero, right? Given that compilers are a very academic niche (people get PhDs in this), I don't at all see why university would be a waste of time.

The good news is that there are lots of open source languages out there that could use help (most?). Nothing stopping you from getting there on your own, it just seems that guidance from professors on such a deep subject would help a lot.

Agree, it's unlikely they used you as a benchmark, because most companies simply don't believe they need to. Though they should at least test with their own employees.

Also, on multiple occasions I've been told, "don't worry about salary, focus on getting us the right candidate." When I do so: "Oh, we can't afford more than $X." I now try to test the waters with, "Developers with that experience often make north of $150K, is that still in range?"

It's a lot less about size than content. I've written about this in detail here:

http://www.madeupname.com/careercourse/resume-tips-developer...

I'd say the two most common issues are typos (especially capitalization) and weak phrasing that hides what you did.