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

Neranja said:

My personal opinion, formed during my university education in CS and cemented having to deal with people and their "fallout":

Learn assembly language, best for your current target platform - most likely x86 or ARM. Not as your first language, but as a second language. Then go into the debugger and look what it created from your code. This obviously doesn't work well on interpreter/bytecode languages like JavaScript/Python/Java. If you program C/C++ go to https://godbolt.org/

Once you learned how a processor operates, how the registers and its access to memory works suddenly a lot of high level concepts like call-by-reference and pointers, even pointers to pointers will click into place, making you an infinitely better programmer.

Then you read things like this: https://akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf

Click to expand...

This 1000x. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

I have a tough time agreeing someone doing code camps should learn assembly

Deathwing said:

I don't mind QA if I can get a fair bit of programming in. Any decent QA job should have some because you need to have a robust automated regression testing system.

So, I'm having trouble interpreting my boredom. 5+ years in the same job? QA itself is just boring no matter how much you have to do? Not enough development work due to being understaffed for the last two years?

Click to expand...

QA is a dead career. We don't even hire for it at my company anymore. QA has been replaced with highly skilled specific targeted areas such as Performance, Scale, Security, etc.

Yea QA is dead. And Scrum is the future! All those small software companies will definitely be replacing one QA job with 3 highly skilled, very specific jobs.

We have QA here. I don't know their dev stuff though. Mostly they just automate scripts to manipulate firmware

They developed a massive framework around it and have servers in data centers worldwide that they run nightly. It's so massive at this point that they're being reined in a bit

Khane said:

Yea QA is dead. And Scrum is the future! All those small software companies will definitely be replacing one QA job with 3 highly skilled, very specific jobs.

Click to expand...

Then a developer should be doing that work. Simple tasks that the majority of QA do shouldn't require a secondary function to perform. If you arn't hiring for a specific role just hire another dev.

I can see it both ways, but I will tell you that Windows patching with SDETs was miles ahead of Windows patching post SDETs.

TJT said:

If I was a developer who had to not only develop features but also write a bunch of selenium scripting or whatever on top of my own unit tests I'd probably tell you to go fuck yourself. Or just quit.

Are you really talking about SDET over the traditional QA employee?

Click to expand...

Yes. I should have been clearer. Manual QA is dead as a career. Thank god-

I also wouldn't hire a SDET who isn't capable of being a member of the main development team also. I'm not a fan of the Core Dev team looking down on secondary functions.

MusicForFish said:

I'm looking at taking a udemy course, or just an online course to really solidify my skills and build some portfolio projects that make sense.

Click to expand...

MusicForFish said:

It's hard to keep chugging along after nearly a year and a half out of bootcamp without so much as an interview.

Click to expand...

I didn't go back to see if you'd posted background before, so sorry if this isn't on target, but this seems very odd to me. Have you not built any portfolio projects in the last year and a half?
Also, I'm not sure how bad your bootcamp was, but one Udemy course isn't going to fix everything. You just need to be building things. Pick something that you'd like to make and then don't stop googling until you've built a basic version of it. Repeat.

Aside from actually being able to dev, if you've gone a year and a half with no interviews, you've got to be doing something wrong. You should probably post some details of what exactly you're doing and maybe PM someone your actual resume/linkedin/whatever so you can get some direct feedback on what's going wrong. If your pitch is so mis-tuned that you can't get anyone to talk to you, your skill never gets a chance to matter.

Edit:
Ok, got curious and checked.

MusicForFish said:

Since I last posted I have taught myself a tiny bit of vue.js, node.js, mariadb, mongodb, Drupal 8, jumped from windows to linux, learned css grid front to back, taught myself how to use GIMP properly.

Click to expand...

Ok so you have the pieces for fullstack web dev, which is what I assume your bootcamp was for. If you don't already have any, build something, anything, that shows you can fullstack. It's fine if it's simple, but make it complete and usable (not hideous and reasonable usability are bonuses) so you can actually send it to someone and have them use it. Use Github, and make sure your code is well commented. Have an actual portfolio page, simple is fine. We've been hiring people from those bootcamps and have been happy to have them. All of them do what I just said, and they all look almost idential, but it seems to work for them (a few have gotten taken offers at other places instead, so it's not just us being desperate). If you're not getting interviews with those skills listed, then something else is definitely wrong.

Neranja said:

Oh, here is another hard pill to swallow: Like math and music instruments, programming is a skill that can be told, but not taught.

Click to expand...

Sure. But why assembly?

I write assembly for work, I have a computer engineering degree and I agree with it's importance. But I don't understand why we would suggest someone trying to break into the field via coding camps should spend significant time on it.

Noodleface said:

Sure. But why assembly?

I write assembly for work, I have a computer engineering degree and I agree with it's importance. But I don't understand why we would suggest someone trying to break into the field via coding camps should spend significant time on it.

Click to expand...

100% Agree. Coding camps should stick to common skillsets like Java, C# and associated technologies. They shouldn't go into more difficult-to-do-right technologies like Assembly and Machine Code.

I think learning assembly is great, I just think like maybe that's something you do on the side once to see how stuff works. Unless assembly is your goal, then by all means