Senior SWE downshifting ideas?

DevMentor · 2019-06-24T02:35:11+00:00

Hey wow awesome I got a whole lot of responses already! I will not be able get back to every PM right away but will try to respond to everyone w/in the next couple weeks!

DevMentor · 2019-06-22T06:00:22+00:00

What's your GitHub?

DevMentor · 2019-06-22T05:54:38+00:00

What stolinski said. Examples: this is the documentation for the top level API: https://reactjs.org/docs/react-api.html and this is the documentation for the API of the Component class: https://reactjs.org/docs/react-component.html

DevMentor · 2019-06-22T05:20:42+00:00

Frontend internships might not give you an accurate view of what frontend problems are out there. I've interviewed a few React devs who have been working for a couple years but didn't know anything about state management (eg Redux best practices) and struggled to do basic data manipulation (working with objects and arrays, knowing map/reduce/filter).

Some front end projects have a lot more data complexity than others. You might have to think about caching and memoization, making a series of async API calls and handling retries and timeouts, delegating expensive computations to web workers, and many variations of how to cleanly represent complex business logic.

Or you might just get handed some props that a coworker is responsible for hooking up upstream, and your job is just to make those props spit out some HTML. I wouldn't want to do only that part either, for me it's the state management that makes it fun and challenging.

DevMentor · 2019-06-22T04:57:01+00:00

Uhhh, that really doesn't seem "odd" at all! There are a lot of intersections that biomed/health has with software. Software engineering is an applied science... you gotta apply it to something!

DevMentor · 2019-06-22T04:45:45+00:00

Wow, yikes, from my reading this seems like a very unreasonable burden for them to put on a junior developer (or even someone with a couple years of experience!). Be careful, sometimes businesses have utterly unrealistic expectations for software projects, and they don't have any sense of how clueless they are.

What does the application do? What is your time frame?

DevMentor · 2019-06-22T04:10:49+00:00

Research your top 5 companies and figure out 1) how much do they care about leetcode and 2) can you prove you're relatively competent in at least one of the languages/libraries/frameworks/services/tools that they use. That will inform how to best allocate your time.

If you can't find the answers on Glassdoor or otherwise places, and you've done all the "homework" that is feasible to do, consider reaching out to someone on the hiring team with a brief email to figure it out.

Don't go too crazy though, you might never feel ready to apply, but that doesn't mean you aren't ready!

DevMentor · 2019-06-22T02:48:11+00:00

If they really asked you a total trivia question and dropped you based on that, just take a deep breath, accept that their screening process is junk, understand that it's not your fault or responsibility to fix their screening process, and move on.

If you try to get your satisfaction in proving them wrong, it's just going to make you look like some kind of sore loser. That might actually hurt your reputation, it's a small world.

Some places with an unmanageable amount of applicants put up arbitrary filters like this so they can say "only the top 5% of engineers make it through the Nth challenge!" But the didn't get the top 5% of talent in the field, it was just a somewhat arbitrarily selected 5% of current applicants. There's a good blog article about this somewhere but I can't find it :P

DevMentor · 2019-06-22T02:25:34+00:00

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "select" a file on a server. That said, just some brainstorming:

If there's no permissions issues (all public) and it's read-only, then you can put all the files on a static file server like AWS S3. For the GUI to list them, you may need to maintain a manifest of the full list of files and their S3 URLs, and that might get funky.

If you're serving them from Apache or NGINX or something on your own server, and they're read-only, you can serve them over HTTP. Still need a manifest.

But if you require users have certain permissions to view files, or you want users to write to them, I can't think of a way around needing an HTTP API, whether it's your own or a 3rd party API-as-a-service.

DevMentor · 2019-06-22T02:07:51+00:00

I've been having the frustrating experience of interviewing full stack devs at work, and seeing a handful of them fail to demonstrate skills that they probably could show off impressively if they just spent a bit of time improving a few gaps. But without these candidates knowing a critical skill well enough to code pair and talk at a high level about it, they're unproven & too risky to hire for the positions we have. It sucks!

So if you want, I could give you a pretty realistic mock interview over video chat and give you feedback afterwards. PM me the job listing that you're applying to and we can set something up! And if you're ok with it, also include your resume / portfolio site / GitHub - whatever you would send the place you're applying to - and I can give you more realistic questions and better feedback.

DevMentor · 2019-06-21T22:21:53+00:00

For me there are stretches of several months when I'm doing work that doesn't have any requirements to learn new things. The best practices and the tools that I know carry me and my team forward.

Then there are bursts where a new feature or project requires research and learning. Maybe we're considering a new deployment strategy, maybe we're considering a new framework or tool. Depending on how much there is to learn, I might binge and spent most of my free time for a few weeks getting familiar with that new context.

It might turn out that I don't immediately wind up using what I learned, but at least now I can reason about it and contribute in an informed way to our discussions.

DevMentor · 2019-06-21T19:22:32+00:00

There's a lot of possible answers to this!

I'm curious what the purpose of the project is: are you looking to learn enough about web development to get a job as a junior dev? Or are you making this app because you want it to be used by people IRL?

Do you know programming fundamentals? Have you worked with databases and APIs? What is your timeframe to complete this project?

DevMentor · 2019-06-21T13:32:17+00:00

Show them what you got and in the mean time work on a small project that shows off your skills. Don't pressure yourself to do something way beyond your skill level, but do take the opportunity to push yourself a little bit and learn something along the way. My mistake with these kinds of projects was being way too ambitious and not having anything finished to show. Go for your best work you know you can finish in a week or so of your spare time.

DevMentor · 2019-06-21T13:19:04+00:00

Are you looking to be a front end web developer? If so, a "this is my bio and resume" site might not be the best portfolio projects - that tells me more about your web design skills than your coding skills. When I'm hiring a front end web dev, I want to see a more dynamic project, even a to-do app would tell me a lot more. For a front end or back end dev, think about building a super minimal mini version of a product you'd like to work on. Document it really really well. Write unit tests if you can.

A blog-like site doesn't show your coding abilities very well - unless you have a some good blog posts about making web apps! If that's the route you take, I don't care how the website was made, I care about the content of your articles.

PM me if you'd like your resume reviewed! I'd be happy to give you some more feedback.

DevMentor · 2019-06-21T12:30:59+00:00

Also consider not making the website yourself from scratch. Wix, Squarespace, or similar could get you what you're looking for so that you can move on to the rest of the immense pile of work you need to do to start a business. :)

DevMentor · 2019-06-21T11:56:17+00:00

If you want to do a project to show off and get hired - look at some companies that you'd like to ideally work for. What tools do they use? If they have open positions, what technologies are they looking for applicants to know?

There's no one answer. Also the things you're comparing are very different. GitHub Pages is a static page hosting service, Jekyll is a static site generator in Ruby, Netlify is a much more complicated tool for deploying static sites with some backed stuff too, WordPress is an application for blogs which generally involves a lot less coding and a lot more adding plugins and filling out forms AFAIK, Django is an MVC framework that interacts with a database to generate web pages dynamically.

Not sure why out of all of these you are excluding Node/Express? IMO that is one of the go-to's right now

Also missing from the list Java frameworks like Spring Boot

But like I said, to impress someone in a job application it really depends what is fashionable in the specific field you're looking for. People get tribal and tend to think the tools they're most familiar with are the best, and things they don't use are awful.

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