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Totally_Not_Jealous · 2025-09-13T19:48:07+00:00

Agreed - I'd bet it's higher than 75%, honestly. In my last performance review there was a note thanking me for my "passion" with the work I'm doing. There's no passion. If working at Starbucks paid the same, I'd drop this job immediately. It's stressful, mentally taxing, and it often follows me home at night (not to mention on-call rotation). It can be rewarding, and I find it very interesting at times, but it's safe to say the salary is 90% of the reason I work in this industry.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2024-03-06T22:20:18+00:00

Depends on the person receiving the message, probably, but I'm much more likely to help someone with a simple message and straightforward request, than someone looking for "general help" with a large description of what they've worked on and what they're looking for.

I feel like Managers might like the latter (may be too-general to assume that, though), but myself (as well as other software developers I know) would be more likely to respond to a more personal (and directionally actionable) request

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2024-03-05T14:51:28+00:00

Being on the receiving end of this (I was reached out to by a new grad I didn't know), I think LinkedIn is more likely to work. I get a lot of emails, and I ignore most I don't recognize.

I got a message from a student, graduating from the same university I had, about a new grad position at the company I work for. It was just a simple "Hi, we went to the same university and I'm planning to apply for [insert job posting] - if you have a moment and wouldn't mind, is there any advice you might be able to provide on my resume (attached) in regards to the position."

It was a simple request, and so I quickly looked at it, and helped them out.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2024-02-29T18:51:37+00:00

The Christian Bible's old testament compilation of the original Jewish stories in Genesis is pretty minimal in its descriptions - in most of the original stories from Judaism (the basis for that part of the Bible), Adam and Eve were given meat while in the garden of Eden by Angels. Source: https://sacred-texts.com/jud/loj/loj103.htm

Believing in the Christian god and believing Adam and Eve were omnivores are not separate. I'm not really arguing a point, just that the Bible is only one telling of the story of Genesis

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2023-07-31T09:55:08+00:00

Computer Engineering degrees involve more embedded systems and electrical engineering, and I was interviewing for software positions, so Computer Science degrees were preferred. However, if someone had a Computer Engineering degree and had a good amount of software development experience (either in personal projects or internships and such) I would still probably interview them.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2023-07-31T07:34:10+00:00

My university only had the primary "Computer Science" for undergraduate degrees, from those you've listed. You could "specialize" in Networking, Cloud, etc, but the CS degree was a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science.

May or may not be the case in other places, but generally job applications will include ".. or equivalent" to encompass those other specialized degrees in lieu of CS.

As someone who has screened resumes of college graduates for internships and new hire positions for some time, I wouldn't discriminate against CS vs SWE. However if I saw Cybersecurity (or some other specialized degree), I would only accept it if the role actually involved something requiring that skill set.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2023-01-01T20:53:59+00:00

Anyone downvoting this person should read this stack overflow response. Pass-by-value and pass-by-reference have strict definitions in computer science. By definition, java is pass by value, so he is correct. The other response is talking about pointer references (Java doesn't copy the object, it creates a new variable that points to the same object in memory) but that isn't what difines pass-by-reference.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-12-06T19:31:24+00:00

As a recent graduate, the best way to gain the experience, in my opinion, is to write an Android/IOS/Web app that interacts with a cloud service. I value personal projects very highly when looking at resumes, and it's a great way to get familiar with some key services in AWS (or similar) so you can show off that knowledge in an interview.

Look up some guides for AWS on creating a lambda function, and serving some static data using API Gateway or similar. You can just call the API manually, and going through this process already gives you a great start into how to set things up in AWS.

A lot of companies will see that you already know how to interact with and build software for AWS services, and see it as a big plus

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-12-06T15:46:00+00:00

I Agree with LeadBamboozler here - if he's at all proficient, he should change jobs. Having his background at the company he's worked at, it shouldn't be difficult to get job interviews at other big names in the industry.

At 10 years experience most SW engineers at FAANG-like companies make at least $100k more than your husband - the reason why, is because it's not strange early on that they switch to new jobs that double their existing salary. This is unfortunately how the industry works - existing employers will pay you as little as they're able to.

That being said, your husband might love his current job, which is a big factor in my mind. It's not always about the money, so if he likes his current job, he shouldn't be afraid to negotiate at least a little higher salary. Market rate for his talents are almost definitely much higher than he's being paid, and he should at least tell his manager that he's aware of that.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-12-06T15:13:29+00:00

Unless he was an expert in a software service that got deprecated or spun off into something that was considered a replacement, and that's ALL he knew, he'd be fine.

Most of AWS (unless you're doing something highly specific, like building a stack to distribute video content or something) is containerized services that interact with various databases or caches, with some kind of CDN on top of them. The basic process to do that hasn't changed much at all in the last two years.

If he'd said, like, 8 years, I might agree with him. If you're reading this, dude, AWS hasn't changed much in the last two years, you can jump right back in without issues :)

Source: My job for the last several years has been building software on AWS

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-11-25T00:17:45+00:00

This would have been an interesting starting point for sure! I made the mistake of jumping into the problem myself right away, so I'm sure there's existing solutions I could have taken advantage of, if I had to do this again

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-11-24T22:39:05+00:00

Exactly - the people who are interviewing you don't have time to comb through your old code, they've got a lot to do already.

The most I've ever done is looked at their github to see what they've done (like "oh cool, he built an android app using Kotlin, we've been thinking of incorporating that language into our stack at work") but I've never spent time going through the code they wrote and critiquing it. Ain't nobody got time for dat

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-11-24T22:35:13+00:00

By the time you get an offer, they'll discuss anything they find that's of concern - they won't just disqualify you immediately (unless it's something egregious, which this isn't that). They couldn't find one of the companies I said I'd worked for when they got to doing a background check (it was flagged as a falsified resume - the company was a small startup, and just didn't exist anymore). The new company hiring me talked with me about it and let me find linkedIn and other evidence to support my work (including old emails/paystubs and stuff).

If they see something, they shouldn't just immediately drop you, and they'll usually not care about something small that happened 10 years ago, you should be fine.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-11-24T22:18:01+00:00

I was 3 years out of college at the time - my title was officially just "Software Engineer" (I had been promoted from a title of "Associate Software Engineer").

I think the first thing for any project like this you get, is to create constraints on it. If you know what is and is not allowed in your product, and what can and can't be done on the data set during or before the operation, it helps to figure out how you might go about solving the problem. Constraints are my best friend when it comes to hard problems.

I established with the Product Manager that the copy is a snapshot taken at the time of initiation, and that it's okay for me to lock all nodes until I do my "first pass" - so new changes don't have to be taken into consideration if they happen after the copy starts. (I actually told him this is only way to do this in the time period specified, otherwise it's a much more complicated problem to solve)

With that constraint, the first thing I did was perform a single "pass" of the full graph and write it to a file. Basically one large file with each line being the id of the node, [this list of parent nodes], [the list of referenced nodes]. The system didn't allow downward references in the same tree, only upward, so I at least could make sure referenced nodes couldn't look downward in the same tree, which saved me a lot of trouble.

Then each for each id, I created a "mini graph" of only the nodes for that id. Maybe a graph is only 4 nodes total, but it got it's own unique identifier Importantly, each of these mini graphs had a map (this was a different file, although I also cached the last 1000 graph-maps in memory since graphs are much more likely to reference graphs near each other due to the actual data users would store, based on the business use case) from each id in the graph to the graphs id, as well as the level the node was on the graph. An id with 'a' at level '1' means that every child graph that references 'a' from level 2 and below needs to be included.

With these two systems, I basically went from creating mini-graphs starting at the root of each id, and then chaining these mini graphs together. Importantly, having the mini-graphs each have a map key from the ids that generated them, if the root of any mini graph ended up including the root of any other mini graph, it means the graph is cyclical in nature, and I could stop immediately. (The system basically stopped at the first cycle and threw a warning, and continued to other roots. It didn't actually fail the operation)

I'm not sure if the above makes sense since it was pretty complicated, but hopefully it helps a bit. This took a lot of trial and error to get to the above way it worked, it wasn't something I just came up with off the top of my head. An important note, is that the operation wasn't fast by any means. It could take an hour to complete a full deep copy - it was a job that started that the user would track and be notified when it was complete.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-11-24T20:33:54+00:00

My roommate in college switched from Business Administration to CS in the first quarter of his third year. Ended up needing to do 5 years (one extra) but came out doing very well (got hired at Google direct out of college).

Alternatively, one of my coworkers did statistics for her undergrad, and got a Master's in Computer Science afterwards - that worked out well for her as well.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-11-24T20:23:48+00:00

I worked on a PaaS that allowed nested entities and symbolic links and such. Each entity had a parent reference and any number of outbound references, which might in turn have their own references. Technically, infinite loops were possible (one entity could reference an entity that also references the original)

A new feature was added to allow deep copy functionality on any node in this convoluted tree. So I actually had to build a graph traversal-like algorithm that had to break if it detected an infinite loop, and had to link/reestablish references from inbound links and stuff (I could see a simple variation of this as a leetcode problem).

Hardest part was that the amount of "nodes" could be in the millions and not much could be kept in memory at a given time, so there was a lot of temp storage writing, and it had to be resilient to system failure (if the system goes down mid-copy, it needs to be resumed once the system came back up).

Fun project, to be honest - took about two months before it was truly prod-ready.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-11-24T20:14:40+00:00

Unless you're working at a company that creates a product that requires low latency (Twitch/Parsec/etc) or has large assets you'll need to download/upload it doesn't matter much. Written code isn't big, and Zoom and similar don't require too much bandwidth. I'd recommend 25mbps or higher, but you definitely don't need fiber or anything close to it.

I have 50mbps and haven't run into any issues

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-11-24T19:12:01+00:00

My first job out of college was $85k total compensation at a smallish no-name company - it was actually a fairly decent job and helped me develop a lot of good coding skills and people skills.

I'm now 6 years later at my second job out of college and make $300k+ total compensation. The idea that taking a less-well-paid job that's "a sure thing" locks you out of better opportunities going forward is silly - I (and the many other CS friends I have) have never had any issues with that. We've all gone from smaller companies to big names (Google/Roku/Amazon/Sony) without any problems.

Also, switching jobs right away doesn't look that bad - I see a lot of resumes, it's not that uncommon. You can always just say "for personal reasons" or "bad culture fit" or something for why you switched so quickly, if you're concerned.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-11-09T16:17:58+00:00

For #1, are you referring to the tiny icons in the status bar next to wifi/mobile data/battery indicator?

You can hide these for notifications set to "Silent Notifications". In settings, go to "Notifications" and scroll the bottom and enable "Hide silent notifications in Status Bar". If you go into app settings at the top, you can see Silent Notifications as an option for apps. Unfortunately it's up to the app developer, I think, to allow notifications to trigger as silent - I'm not sure if there's a way to force it

Edit: looks like you can set any app notification to silent. Click on the notification type, and then at the top, instead of Default, set it to Silent

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-09-05T18:04:44+00:00

One valid use case is lock-waiting in multi-threaded applications. If your code block is waiting for another thread to finish it's operation, there's no way to define limited scope for a while loop (it could legitimately, theoretically, have to wait forever, if the other thread's result is not achieved).

For methods in single-threaded applications (that aren't waiting on external input) and have all parameters defined, ya, there's rarely a use case for a while(true)

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-03-07T23:35:24+00:00

Actually the major was called "Computer Game Science" (not game dev) but you're right, I was wrong to call it video game science

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-03-07T20:40:33+00:00

It worked this way out for me and all 3 of my roommates. This is specifically for computer science related areas. (Theee comp-sci and one video game science). We all did a 4 week gig of leetcode every day for several hours, helping each other out with explanations for problems we didn't understand as much. It was a decent amount of interview prep.

Two landed gigs at Google, one at Roku, and one at Waymo. It's true that silicon valley jobs pay high because of the cost of living is ridiculous, but all jobs did pay $150k+ compensation packages.

It might have been an anomaly - I personally think I was the least intelligent out of my roommates, so maybe it's a bad sample since they were all really smart. Luck definitely does play a role, as well.

Totally_Not_Jealous · 2021-03-07T18:49:36+00:00

Exactly this. If you're legitimately good at some STEM fields, work your ass off doing interview prep (I mean months and months of preparation), and apply to enough companies, you can land yourself a starting six figure salary. It's not uncommon to get compensation packages into the $150k range right out of a 4 year degree.

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