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Question of the Day: What's the most interesting small town you've visited in South Africa?
Work Experience vs Learned Experience
- Thread starter Stephen
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...and my personal favorite, it's a joy to travel in EU for work, school & holidays, such an easy launch point to anywhere; language can be a barrier in some countries, not education wise because most large cities have really English schools; bonus I picked up French after living there for 6 years. The US like SA is plagued with a snowflake generation just way too much leftist hogwash.Funny thing is I prefer EU, I’d gladly go in like the minimal time where as US it’s meh.. ok. I know career wise it’s arguably better but keep in mind it’s family move so spouse and I are looking and going.. gun control, school shootings, Political instability, Gov debt, social inequality, QoL costs.. and we not even talking about SA
Chasing the US for money is just not worth it IMO, those e.g. who chase Silicon Valley soon realize that it's horribly expensive to live there and the infrastructure sucks in comparison to most EU countries, making the commute very awful; places like: Texas, New York, Atlanta and Seattle are far better options IMO; still when it comes down to it the EU quality of life can't easily be beaten, you pay a lot more tax in most countries but you can see why?
Some more "traditional" hiring managers want people with specific experience, and don't realize how pointless it is. Other times, your problem is not the hiring manager but the recruitment agent.
I had an argument with a recruitment agent once. I was looking for a contract role, looking for a rate of R300 per hour. Back then I think I had 5-6 years of total development experience, and some of that experience included various forms of ASP.Net MVC. Like, traditional ASP.Net without the MVC part, as well as MVC 3 and MVC 4. Anyway, so I got in touch with this agent and she said to me that the client wants someone with 5 years of ASP.Net MVC experience. Not 5 years of experience total but 5 years of specific ASP.Net MVC experience. I tried to explain to her why that was mostly irrelevant as at this time I had at least a year of MVC experience. But anyway, she didn't get it, and wouldn't put me through for the role at my requested rate.
I ended up taking another role through a different agent, at my requested rate, and the role was an ASP.Net MVC role. I told this agent that I got my requested rate and she basically had no response.
I do wonder if that kind of thinking is more prevalent in South Africa though. In the UK, I have just been hired for a Kotlin role. I have absolutely zero Kotlin experience. They didn't even ask me about my Java experience or knowledge, just general programming and problem solving questions.
I had an argument with a recruitment agent once. I was looking for a contract role, looking for a rate of R300 per hour. Back then I think I had 5-6 years of total development experience, and some of that experience included various forms of ASP.Net MVC. Like, traditional ASP.Net without the MVC part, as well as MVC 3 and MVC 4. Anyway, so I got in touch with this agent and she said to me that the client wants someone with 5 years of ASP.Net MVC experience. Not 5 years of experience total but 5 years of specific ASP.Net MVC experience. I tried to explain to her why that was mostly irrelevant as at this time I had at least a year of MVC experience. But anyway, she didn't get it, and wouldn't put me through for the role at my requested rate.
I ended up taking another role through a different agent, at my requested rate, and the role was an ASP.Net MVC role. I told this agent that I got my requested rate and she basically had no response.
I do wonder if that kind of thinking is more prevalent in South Africa though. In the UK, I have just been hired for a Kotlin role. I have absolutely zero Kotlin experience. They didn't even ask me about my Java experience or knowledge, just general programming and problem solving questions.
We’re getting a bit off topic, but my take is to go to the US for money, quality of life, and a really interesting tech career. The Silicon Valley area is the best for the money and tech, but quality of life is better in and around various other areas of the US. Portland, Seattle, Chicago and NY being my favorites. The issue with Silicon Valley to me isn’t really the cost (after 4 years your vesting schedule is at full pace), but the aesthetics of the place and visible lack of cultural identity.
Most European countries have great QoL, and a key point is that it’s more of a guarantee than the US. Good tech companies are harder to find and compensation is generally quite a bit lower, but then with the far superior social support, there is less pressure to save a ton of money before retirement.
Personally, I travel between the two several times a year and typically spend months in Europe, so I get the best of both worlds.
Most European countries have great QoL, and a key point is that it’s more of a guarantee than the US. Good tech companies are harder to find and compensation is generally quite a bit lower, but then with the far superior social support, there is less pressure to save a ton of money before retirement.
Personally, I travel between the two several times a year and typically spend months in Europe, so I get the best of both worlds.
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At the US companies (which also have UK branches) I’ve worked at, we’ve never cared about specific language or tool experience at all. I’ve often scratched my head at the “salary by programming language/technology” section of some of the salary surveys.
Yet most jobs (even in the US) specify required language experience, similarly some languages and skill sets are just easier to pick up than others.
Not so much - many job adverts perhaps, however the jobs specifications through which most employees come in, either don't really have specific requirements at all, or they are really just preferences.
As an example, the most generic Google Software Engineer job:
https://www.indeed.com/q-Google-Software-Engineer-jobs.html?vjk=f80633a521846e85
There may be other jobs, e.g., Embedded Developers at the company, requiring C/C++ or such, but those jobs will take 10's of candidates, whereas the job description above will be how thousands or even tens of thousands get into the company.
Or Amazon's Software Development Engineer:
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/785578/software-development-engineer
Once again, a job that takes many thousands.
Facebook Software Engineer, University Grad:
https://venturefizz.com/jobs/boston/software-engineer-university-grad-at-facebook-cambridge-ma
Goldman Sachs Core Engineering R&D too:
https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listi...m?jl=2998089885&ctt=1548618694449&srs=EI_JOBS
Being on the hiring side for approx. 20 years now, the vast majority of my questions are not language specific for these reasons. The ones that are, I would only ask if that language is listed on the resume. They are also not language "knowledge" based questions, but rather why one would prefer doing things one way or another.
I should add that as the job becomes “lower skilled”, languages do become more important since it becomes a relatively large portion of the skill set. Also one of the reasons I am often confused by the language surveys - the higher the income, the less language even matters, so how are the results meaningful?
Edit: one more thing: H1B approval for a candidate requires that companies advertise for the intended position. Many of the more specific ads are for this purpose, since the more generic ones will get hit too often. E.g., trying to hire an OS programmer from India, but a web developer from Boston applies for the same job number. The company now has a responsibility to compare the two.
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I would say the opposite. The more senior, the more domain specific rather than language specific.
We could go back and forth on this topic, simple reality is that it's expected that a more senior person is able to figuratively hit the ground running and that assumes language profiiency and a level of mastery re skillset / domain.
If we hire an ML developer, it doesn’t matter if their experience is in Python, C++, Java or R. If we hire a networking specialist, it doesn’t matter if their experience is C, C++, ARM or RISC asm. If we hire a financial engineer, they need to know the relevant math, and algorithms, not in any particular language. If we want an accelerator specialist, we don’t care which of OpenCL, CUDA, MIC AVX, or Close To Metal they know. Etc.
The domain knowledge is such a high bar to entry vs any language, it barely matters. If we find someone who we think is even marginally better in their domain, we will take them over someone who knows the toolkit we use.
Hitting the ground running is not our concern, but rather how fast they’ll be running a year from starting.
As I said we could go back and forth on this topic, e.g. I could show you a number of adverts that dispute your claims and you could counter that they're exceptions not the rule.
Reality is environments differ including work culture and category of work, meaning your synopsis IMO represents only your environment, whereas mine is based on our consultancy, our work entails for example: kickstarting projects and teams, helping a struggling project to get back on schedule and / or to overcome blocking points, etc.
Under that premise I and my colleagues wouldn't secure contracts if we couldn't literally hit the ground running. Similarly for example a mate of mine that works in the LLVM compiler world is equally expected as a more senior engineer to get up to speed fairly quickly, and by not being language proficient would make that an impossibility.
I will certainly admit that a contract engineer is a different situation. For companies that want permanent staff or have a sufficiently long learning curve for their own environment, knowing the tech stack is simply a convenient plus.
Not sure, what knowing the language has to do with LLVM. If someone is building an LLVM front end, and tuning the LLVM back end for a particular language, it is far more important that they are familiar with compilers than the language they are targeting (at least at hire time). Taking it up one level, knowing LLVM is great, but I would rather hire someone who only knows GCC and has stronger compiler domain knowledge than someone who has LLVM experience for example.
Nope, not only... your situation may differ, but surely you aren't brazen enough to assume this applies to every corporate out there.
Tsk tsk, really? LLVM was coded in C++, and I guess you just automatically assume the other tools wouldn't use C++ either (yet they do)
As I said we could go back and forth but that is as I implied pointless...
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Not all, but most.
Tsk tsk, really? LLVM was coded in C++, and I guess you just automatically assume the other tools wouldn't use C++ either (yet they do)
I am quite aware of that, Sunshine, you shouldn't guess. Try read it again to understand my point.
Nope; been down this road with you before; you think the world runs on your cue.
Sorry snowflake it doesn't.
Kosmik
Honorary Master
Keep it civil folks.
I was about to get an interview for a company in Dublin, but the ####ing recruiter
.We were speaking for a month and everything went great, up until he asked me if I have TDD experience.
Is it such a massive pain to not have TDD experience??? I had every single thing on the job spec beside that.
The guy just said, no... the company that he is recruiting for, Verizon; is big on TDD.
I was about to get an interview for a company in Dublin, but the ####ing recruiter
We were speaking for a month and everything went great, up until he asked me if I have TDD experience.
Is it such a massive pain to not have TDD experience??? I had every single thing on the job spec beside that.
The guy just said, no... the company that he is recruiting for, Verizon; is big on TDD.
Meh... I think unfortunately you just got a bad recruiter.
First, TDD is not such a foreign idea that you could not learn it in a day or two.
Second, after 12 years of development experience, I have yet to work in an environment with good testing discipline. Everyone will ask you about your unit test experience, and then you see your code base, and you see how badly they maintain their tests.
I'm sure some of the larger companies have better unit test coverage, but most that I've worked with like to talk about unit tests but don't like to write them. So, you probably would have been able to do the job just fine.
I know right? It's almost like TDD was the whole deciding factor of whether one gets the job or not. Maybe I should have lied and said that I have been doing TDD all my life, it's not even difficult, I played around with it after that experience.