IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Where's the best place to start looking for side work/consulting/etc?

You know, I really fucking hate asking questions on Stackoverlow / Stack Exchange sometimes. I ask what is, I think, a completely legit question and immediately get downvoted with no explanation why.

Stack overflow is absolute trash for that stuff. You have to word your question perfect (to their standards), include your code (but not too much, or too little) and perform an exercise in futility when they tell you to use some library that you can't.

I'm still trying to figure out how I bamboozled my way into a job here. Since I've started here we've had 2 open positions and we've interviewed a fuckton of people and 0 hires. So they've been open approx 9 months. I've interviewed people who seemed like extremely intelligent and productive developers and during the meet up session people are giving them a 2/5 rating so we don't proceed.

Though last week I was the main dissenter on one candidate ...

Tenks said:

I'm still trying to figure out how I bamboozled my way into a job here. Since I've started here we've had 2 open positions and we've interviewed a fuckton of people and 0 hires. So they've been open approx 9 months. I've interviewed people who seemed like extremely intelligent and productive developers and during the meet up session people are giving them a 2/5 rating so we don't proceed.

Though last week I was the main dissenter on one candidate ...

Click to expand...

Could it be culture fit? You're a gamer and I suppose many gamers apply, but maybe they gave off poor signals.

This place is driving me nuts. I've been working on a new feature since November. It's taking so long because they keep changing requirements and having me add stuff. Started out as a discrete signal and now it's a giant gui with tons of knobs and a mess of signals. This week they said I needed to hurry up because funding was low. THEN FINALIZE THE REQUIREMENTS FUCK

Generally culture fit is pretty decent. Some people it is pretty obvious they're just using Blizzard as a stop-gap to get to Google. There are a bunch of people here from google and a ton that leave to google. I think the problem right now is these last few positions are realistically the final few positions open on BNet for the hiring blitz they started a year or so ago. This is also the blitz that got me my job. Since we're down to only a few left we're getting very, very picky.

We recently started leveraging HackRank which I think is a horrible way of weeding people out. My boss has even said numerous times that with this new hiring format he doubts Blizzard would have even called him back. But we have only a couple of spots left to fill in BNet and we have over 500 resumes so the idea was to just blast out a HackRank to all these people and take the top handful of candidates from that for on-site interviews. So it makes a bit of sense. But even people with 20+ years of experience who phone screen well we still force to do the test. I'm not convinced that adds any real value. It does give some insight on their knowledge of how the inner workings of like HashMap works or if they can write a concurrent method or not. But in terms of figuring out if they'd contribute to the team ... I'm not convinced.

It almost makes sense with how shitty the legion patches have been. You're picking people that can pass a test

This is for battle net. The teams hire differently. And the hacker rank only allows you to get your foot in the door for an on-site interview. We've only passed on I believe one person who sounded good on the phone but he completely and utterly bombed the hacker rank. It wasn't gotcha questions either his actual code in the "real life" coding problem was hot, hot garbage.

Yeah I figured. Here I didn't have to do any coding and the questions were literally textbook so now it makes sense with who we got

Ya COBOL was joked about at work today and we quickly got informed from one of the new guys on the team there is a COBOL for .net that adds layer calls, etc. Thats all them, I will stay in my own messed up little universe, thank you very much!

There actually is COBOL in .NET?
COBOL Development - Products | Micro Focus

There's 17 billion java programmers and like 3 COBOL programmers. Of course they're desired.

COBOL is a small language. If you so desire to hate your job and rather hang yourself by your balls than put in your 40 hours then go ahead and be a COBOL programmer. It isn't like it requires some super genius skillset.

Money probably

DoD is hiring mad COBOL/FORTRAN/whatever programmers because they fucked around and used them in weapons systems and other shit they can't upgrade. From what I understand, you can make mad dollars.

..I no longer feel like I overcharge for DR services...