Job hunting as a programmer.

Colonel Panic

What yourself!

If you're taking that approach as a learning exercise, how can you know how to program? And if you don't know how to program, how are you going to be able to do a job as a junior programmer?

I dunno if I agree with your assertion anyway, there's a balance between the IDE assisting you too much and the feeling of progress you get from having a little help.

conor.hogan.2

As I said earlier you don't do it for a long time, this is for starting out and for practice for interviews.

Using an IDE is of course vital, otherwise how would you work in any meaningful project.

Also I never said you should not look up help/documentation just that you should not rely to heavy on an IDEs help. Exactly it is a balance, but relying on an IDE too much can bite you later so that is all I am saying.

Jimjay

Colonel Panic wrote: »

If you're applying for a job as a developer that doesn't get you to do a technical test, then I would seriously consider not working there.

I think that really depends. My other half is primarily a sybase developer, (contractor) employers can see by her cv and past experience that she is more than qualified for a job / contract. She hasnt had to do a technical test for a long time for new employment. Although i would imagine for a more junior role a technical test may be a requirement.

There are also some excelent developers that can work very well once employed and cannot handle a test. Some larger employers would probably tell if someone is suitable for a job just by talking to them.

Colonel Panic

I dunno, I think technical tests are appropriate for all levels. Although I will admit it's not practical when contract based work but it's easier to get rid of a crappy contract worker. I could put loads of stuff on my CV and get away with it, and figure it out by the seat of my pants, but it would cost my new employers time and money and make me look bad.

Plus, I know some developers with years and years of C++ experience who are terrible programmers. They get the job done, but it's not the most stable or maintainable code ever.

Good final point though. There are some very bright people out there who just need a shot and are great as working things out on their own.

srsly78

Colonel Panic wrote: »

Although I will admit it's not practical when contract based work but it's easier to get rid of a crappy contract worker.

Never been tested since I became a contractor, I suspect your reasoning is right. Contracting is great, get paid twice as much, less hassle with jobhunting :pac:

morgans303

Buceph wrote: »

Morgan: You say you just have the Java certification, by any chance did you get it through FÁS' online course? I've just started it myself (literally a few hours ago) so I was wondering what you made of it.

I was working with FAS, but they were really unhelpful. They basically tell you to go out and find a place to do the exam yourself, which is very irresponsible. Not to mention, you'll never learn programming from their ****ty narrated slide shows.

Instead, I ditched FAS and learned from books. Then I bought the official Sun Certified Programmer for Java 6 Study Guide. Finally, there's a few centers in Cork and Dublin who host the official Oracle online exam, then they send you the cert a few weeks later.

Buceph

morgans303 wrote: »

I was working with FAS, but they were really unhelpful. They basically tell you to go out and find a place to do the exam yourself, which is very irresponsible. Not to mention, you'll never learn programming from their ****ty narrated slide shows.

Instead, I ditched FAS and learned from books. Then I bought the official Sun Certified Programmer for Java 6 Study Guide. Finally, there's a few centers in Cork and Dublin who host the official Oracle online exam, then they send you the cert a few weeks later.

I've been going through their slides so far. I've been trying to learn myself for about a month or so beforehand, but I was getting nowhere* So I figure the FAS course will give me the structure I need. But you're right about the slides, they're pretty terrible for explaining anything. If I hadn't read about stuff on my own beforehand, I wouldn't have a clue what's going on. It's basically an infodump and you're expected to figure it all out. And they don't highlight what's important, so you'll have a question in the test part about something that was mentioned in an aside in half a sentence somewhere. Hopefully the tutor person is of help, I just e-mailed them my first question earlier today.


*Basically because I was never writing any code. I'd learn something, then think, "If only I could do X, I could make this so much better." Then I'd spend a few hours reading about X and think, "Now that I can do X, adding Y to it would be great." Then I'd head off to learn Y, and on and on. But because I never actually wrote anything it all became a jumble in my head.

BostonB

I've never seen them but I assume those online FAS courses are created by some generic elearning company. TBH I've never been a fan of eLearning, I've tried them (not with FAS) and it bored me to tears. The cram tests are kinda useful.

morgans303

Buceph wrote: »

I've been going through their slides so far. I've been trying to learn myself for about a month or so beforehand, but I was getting nowhere* So I figure the FAS course will give me the structure I need. But you're right about the slides, they're pretty terrible for explaining anything. If I hadn't read about stuff on my own beforehand, I wouldn't have a clue what's going on. It's basically an infodump and you're expected to figure it all out. And they don't highlight what's important, so you'll have a question in the test part about something that was mentioned in an aside in half a sentence somewhere. Hopefully the tutor person is of help, I just e-mailed them my first question earlier today.


*Basically because I was never writing any code. I'd learn something, then think, "If only I could do X, I could make this so much better." Then I'd spend a few hours reading about X and think, "Now that I can do X, adding Y to it would be great." Then I'd head off to learn Y, and on and on. But because I never actually wrote anything it all became a jumble in my head.

Honestly, you don't stand a chance with FAS. Grab a good book from Amazon and learn at your own pace for a while.

yawha

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

Using an IDE is of course vital, otherwise how would you work in any meaningful project.

For a very large project, it's probably valid to say a graphical debugger could be considered vital (though it's possible to become quite the wizard at the likes of gdb).

An IDE in general though? I don't think so. Vim (or other editor), ctags, a compiler and an array of various command line tools is perfectly fine and manageable for a large project.

Colonel Panic

I'd definitely prefer to deal with managing build and compiler settings using a graphical interface myself despite being very comfortable with command line tools.

Most of the requirement for command line tools these days comes from automatic builds I find.

srsly78

Most of the IDEs just wrap command line tools. Even Visual Studio is just a big wrapper around msbuild now. You can compile your stuff from command like easily: msbuild blah.sln.

Colonel Panic

Hasn't that always been the case?

Groinshot

srsly78 wrote: »

Most of the IDEs just wrap command line tools. Even Visual Studio is just a big wrapper around msbuild now. You can compile your stuff from command like easily: msbuild blah.sln.

BUt to get the sln file, the easiest way is to use VS, and while you're at it, you might aswell hit F5 to compile and run... IDE's are there to make our jobs easier, so why not use them? I personally love VS, (if I culd figure out how to change delete a line to ctrl+D), but am comfortable working with a terminal if I need to, but that's like Pixel editing with Paint when I've got Photoshop running in the background.

Giblet

You would have to maintain the proj and sln files in VS anyway, just because another dev might need to use them, or your CI server will **** errors at you if it doesn't build correctly and is missing references.

conor.hogan.2

yawha wrote: »

An IDE in general though? I don't think so. Vim (or other editor), ctags, a compiler and an array of various command line tools is perfectly fine and manageable for a large project.

Of course, I have seen some people in Vim do as much if not more than people using an IDE but most people are not like that.

srsly78

Groinshot wrote: »

BUt to get the sln file, the easiest way is to use VS, and while you're at it, you might aswell hit F5 to compile and run... IDE's are there to make our jobs easier, so why not use them? I personally love VS, (if I culd figure out how to change delete a line to ctrl+D), but am comfortable working with a terminal if I need to, but that's like Pixel editing with Paint when I've got Photoshop running in the background.

I use Visual Studio myself sure. But my automated build system (jenkins) runs cmake first to generate the solution files, then runs build from command line, then runs unit tests - no gui. There is also a linux build generated and tested from the same source by cmake.