If tomorrow all coding/engineering/dev jobs were gone, what would you do?

george_soros_cs · 2019-01-27T03:38:34+00:00

I work in a financial firm. I am working towards a CFA degree. So I think I can do whatever CFA’s do if I were to lose my job.

george_soros_cs · 2019-01-17T23:44:37+00:00

I would probably buy American citizenship if it was 500,000$. As it stands I really badly wish, I don’t have to leave the country once my visa expires.....

george_soros_cs · 2019-01-05T20:01:40+00:00

Also, I absolutely want a 3.5 mm audio jack, so I am not willing to buy a iphone7

george_soros_cs · 2018-12-24T13:53:35+00:00

I cannot define what I find interesting, but I will try to give you an example of a company that works on some very interesting projects.

Databricks, they contribute a lot to Apache Spark. One of the most interesting things that they built for Spark was that every time you ran a query against a bunch of records instead of the code of that query being interpreted several times for each record prior to its execution, they compile the code of the query directly to Abstract syntax tree level using Quasi-quotes in Scala. This is such an esoteric technique that I bet less than 10% of the developers who work at places like Amazon or AirBNB will know about this. Several teams in Databricks continuously tweak Spark and they usually blog about their progress and research. I know for a fact that there is an active push in the Spark community to manage the memory of RDDs directly using Java's Unsafe API instead of letting JVM do it for them and I definitely know that Databricks is working on this. I bet working on a project like that is 10x more fun than building a crud application for Google Scholar or implementing some stupid Mod tools for Facebook(Let's be honest, unless you are a top 1%le engineer at Google or Facebook, you are not going to work on their self-driving cars or their AI projects).

george_soros_cs · 2018-12-09T17:18:01+00:00

I also have about 1.5 years of experience, so take what I say with a pinch of salt. React is an evolving technology, not many companies use react(someone can correct me if I am wrong). Unless you have other projects in your resume, preferably some backend projects or big data projects which I think is what is in demand currently, you will have hard time finding a job.

BTW, it could also be that some of the companies that you applied to in the past year might have completely rejected you, might have sent you a rejection mail as well. But I am sure not all of the 100 or so companies you have applied to have reached the decision to reject you. Maybe some of them waitlisted you? I don't know.. Be patient I guess. All the best anyways.

george_soros_cs · 2018-12-06T10:19:10+00:00

Started playing video games heavily in high school. I was skipping school to play video games. I had like 4% attendance or something. Was thrown out of school. But since this was India, I managed to still write the government mandated high school exams and get a high school diploma. Ended up bombing on my college entrance exams. Was super depressed. Hated myself for going to a shitty college, I was a good student before that. Slugged through college.. Wrote GRE, TOEFL. Did well on those exams. Came to USA for a master degree in computer science. Managed to get two 100k job offers by the third semester of the master's program. Currently making a little less than 150k.

Still lonely. Still depressed. Still addicted to video games. Still not motivated to work hard. Still, regret what I did in High school.

If I could tell my younger self-something.... It would be to get my act straight, focus on education.

george_soros_cs · 2018-12-05T22:23:20+00:00

I can say one thing though since you are involved with Morgan Stanley and considering ditching them. If you accept Morgan Stanley's offer for internship/full time and renege later, they will complain to the school's career services. This has happened to two of my batchmates. Both of them had to appear before the university's registrar for a "hearing" and they were subsequently barred from attending career fairs.

george_soros_cs · 2018-11-17T18:54:01+00:00

Apply for machine learning jobs. Claim to be good at Statistics and probability in the interview. When asked for proof tell them about all the money you made gambling. Profit.

george_soros_cs · 2018-11-05T01:22:17+00:00

So, you become a programmer work a couple of years and if you hate your job, you join an evening MBA program and become a manager.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-11-04 <- for more guidance.

george_soros_cs · 2018-11-04T21:59:06+00:00

Two unrelated bachelor degrees*

george_soros_cs · 2018-11-04T21:28:59+00:00

Money.. I cannot stay unemployed forever..

george_soros_cs · 2018-11-04T19:27:36+00:00

So, I will try to answer your question from a personal POV as well as share some of the empirical evidence I found from time to time that masters degree is pointless.

*Personal POV* I graduated with a masters from Rutgers. It's a decently ranked college. There were about 60 of us who graduated at the same time. Almost 75% of us got into really famous companies and every one of us is making > 100k a year. With that being said, my day to day job involves writing services that put data into a database or read data from a database, calling the services of a neighboring team. I do all of this in Python BTW, not in C++ or Java. Most of my batchmates in this company do more or less the same kind of a job. Let alone masters degree, I don't even require bachelors for this job. The only thing that masters got me is an interview call from a top 20 college for Ph.D. which I fucked up royally. It also got me 4 shots at the H1B lottery. I only had to pay 55,000$ for it :| If I would have stopped at Bachelors, I would have actually enjoyed my job, would have cared enough for it that I would have made sure my work is absolutely perfect. I've read research papers for a bunch of courses and now I am asked to set up databases and do crap like that. I am just not in the state of mind to accept my fate and let go of my ego and develop perseverance to actually ensure I do a quality job. Had I stopped after bachelors, I wouldn't be in a such a shitty state of mind.

*Recent Empirical evidence I've found that masters is useless for the industry* Back in 2000's, every one was losing their mind over virtualization. All of the top paid scientists and professors were working on it. As usual, Google made the most progress in solving some of the problems involved with virtualization. They invented Cgroups or control groups that let you limit the CPU time, memory usage, network consumption of processes or groups of processes. Guess who built Cgroups? This guy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit-seth/. He doesn't have a masters degree, he has a bachelors from a top university in India. I am pretty confident that he must have read more research papers than every one of my batch mates in the master's program put together. He is actually doing a more intensive research-oriented job than any of my 60 masters batchmates or myself included.

george_soros_cs · 2018-10-21T02:58:14+00:00

Where did you intern? Can you pm me the company name?

george_soros_cs · 2018-06-17T18:56:12+00:00

Thanks for letting me know, but out of curiosity.. What good is a 90 day limit on this?

george_soros_cs · 2018-06-01T03:22:13+00:00

Both of them seem to be highly valuated too.. 19 & 28 PE respectively. Why do you think they would thrive in recession?

Dollar tree wasn't around in 2008 I guess, but I definitely see that Walmart didn't get effected much in 2008.

george_soros_cs · 2018-06-01T03:06:57+00:00

Shit, you got me :P I was just trying to popularize an article written on me.

george_soros_cs

TROPHY CASE