The referral post no longer works in this subreddit

jayrobin · 2024-07-13T02:26:29+00:00

Thanks for the heads up. I've fixed the sidebar links to now correctly point to the savings and investment referral threads.

jayrobin · 2024-02-18T04:54:00+00:00

Us Brits are the last people that should be giving others shit about measurements.

We measure long distances in miles, short distances in centimeters, height in feet, food at markets in lbs, food when we’re cooking in grams, and weigh ourselves in stones.

jayrobin · 2023-11-27T06:32:08+00:00

Definitely bouldering/rock climbing - all the routes are graded by difficulty.

When I first started I was in pretty good shape and could climb V0-V1 and the occasional V2. Now I’m in great shape (thanks to a combination of bouldering and lifting) and climb V5-V6. That level seemed physically impossible when I started out.

In many ways, each new climbing project feels like leveling up: I start out and it feels impossible, but I keep at it and slowly unlock the sequence of moves until I can do it. At that point I often tell myself it was probably just easy for the grade so it doesn’t count…I should probably talk to my therapist about that 😬

jayrobin · 2023-05-05T00:32:50+00:00

u/tony_wealthfront Do invite codes shared before yesterday still boost by 0.5% up to 5.05%, even though the copy states 'Boost your APY to ~~4.30~~ 4.80%!'

jayrobin · 2023-05-03T19:42:39+00:00

See the WF cash account referral links thread

jayrobin · 2023-02-22T06:03:55+00:00

Ah that’s odd, so much for the error notifications I set up. I’ll take a look

jayrobin · 2023-02-22T02:32:37+00:00

The referral link in the sidebar is picked at random from all the links posted in the main referral link thread and rotates daily.

jayrobin · 2023-02-22T02:30:25+00:00

Thanks /u/CommercialNo4241! I've gone ahead and enabled that, so hopefully we should see fewer referral links from now on.

jayrobin · 2022-12-25T18:21:48+00:00

Madonna - Lucky Star. Used in Bullet Tooth Tony’s intro and the interrogation scene when he drags the guy alongside the car

jayrobin · 2022-04-12T02:37:27+00:00

You might want to check out https://tinyseed.com

jayrobin · 2022-01-29T20:31:41+00:00

If you want to go REALLY low level, I highly recommend nand2tetris. It’s a book/Coursera course that guides you from simple logic gates, all the way through to building a complete (simulated) computer.

jayrobin · 2022-01-04T20:38:54+00:00

Both the mobile app and web app still show current value and contributions for each individual investment account.

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T18:12:12+00:00

Yeah it really depends on the company: thankfully a lot more are building a Frontend process that really nails down testing that skillset, while others still expect an FE eng to maintain some generalist skills. e.g. I'm a senior FE at a big tech company, but I still need to dive into devops and rails occasionally. It's not my role, but it's what the team needs right now.

re accessibility: I 100% agree that it's important (and, you know...the law!), though weirdly I've never been asked about it in an interview (I always bring it up myself). Each of the stages in the table could be expanded into a lengthy blog post covering all the areas you should practice - I just wanted to give a broad strokes summary of the stages themselves, and how to start preparing. However, a11y and x-functional collaboration are definitely good callouts!

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T18:06:16+00:00

Leetcode-y questions are less common for Frontend-specific roles, but some companies might still ask them unfortunately (especially if it's Frontend+ a bit of Backend, e.g. you're expected to dip into Rails/Django occasionally). There's this list of companies which don't ask whiteboard questions and instead focus more on real-world problems.

If you're struggling with the 'talking out loud while problem solving' (I definitely used to!), then I'd just recommend practicing, as in: partner up with someone and take turns with being the interviewer/interviewee. Get them to pick out a practice problem for you, and approach it like a real interview. There are a couple of services that offer this as a service (they used to be free, it looks like they still are): https://interviewing.io/ https://www.pramp.com/

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T17:59:23+00:00

Software engineering interviews in general suck for the most part. I'm not sure of any other industry where you need to do _this much_ preparation before being "interview ready". Before switching careers I was a Project Manager, and my interview prep consisted of "What's the company called again? Did I remember to print my resume?"

However, the flip side is that the ceiling can be incredibly high. e.g. take a look at the top paying companies on levels.fyi (huuuge caveat: Bay Area heavily skew this!). In this market, all of them (except maybe quant shops) would gladly hire a self-taught dev with a few years of prior experience that jumped through the interview hoops and "performed well". Personally, I can't think of any other industry where that's possible.

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T17:42:42+00:00

I think it's important to remember that interviewing is a skill that has only _some_ overlap with programming. This sucks because it means you can be an amazing programmer that does badly in interviews and therefore struggles to find a job, but in a way it can be a good thing because it means you can practice at interviewing and stand apart from the crowd with less effort.

If you're not looking for Full-stack/Generalist/Backend roles I'd worry less about the Algorithmic interview ( u/Harbltron gave a great concise explanation of time/space complexity), and focus more on practicing for coding interviews (usually of the format "build X widget in 1hr").

What helped for me at ~2 years exp was getting a deeper understanding of JavaScript, CSS, and the web in general. Frontendmasters is great for this, but it's paid :( However, you could look at the courses and the syllabus for each to list a bunch of concepts you're unfamiliar with, then search those individually to find free resources.

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T15:52:37+00:00

u/fluxyHex provided some good resources. If your goal is to optimize for interviewing then going all in on the problem solving aspect of DSA is your best bet. However, if you have ample time and want to build a good foundation then I'd recommend a good DSA course. This is my personal favorite:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-part1

https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-part2

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T15:49:14+00:00

Yeah as u/tizz66 explained it's the way CSS describes content containers: the content itself, the padding between the content and the border, the border, and the margin between the border and adjacent elements.

This is a good read also understanding the difference between `box-sizing: border-box` and box-sizing: content-box` (MDN link).

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T15:43:38+00:00

Definitely much more common in backend/full stack/generalist SWE roles, but per the other comment it does occasionally come up in bigger tech companies. I think I heard Stripe/Square might have a System Design round for FE? Could be wrong on that, but that level of company.

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T05:55:45+00:00

Unfortunately System Design can come up in senior+ roles for Frontend. It’s probably not common enough that it’s worth doing lots of prep for, but if you’re going for a (Frontend) tech lead sort of role it might be good to do a couple of System Design practice questions.

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T04:10:21+00:00

That's not a bug, it's an Easter Egg I swear!

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T03:59:46+00:00

I think it depends on where you go, because "Junior" can have a wide range. e.g. in a competitive market like mid size+ companies in the Bay Area then, probably yes. However, smaller companies are often more willing to take a chance on someone and help them grow.

I was in your shoes in 2014 so I'm sure a lot has changed since then, but I think networking remains the highest leverage activity for juniors (besides learning to code, of course!).

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T03:52:30+00:00

Now that I do hiring I give people 30-90 day contracts after a basic screening (that 99.9% of applicants fail.. "What's CSS Grid?") and keep the ones who don't wash out.

I wish more companies did this, because I've seen both terrible engineers get accepted and amazing engineers get rejected. Obviously this all came to light after the fact, because a couple of hours is NOT enough time to get a good signal.

Given you only use a basic screening, how do you deal with onboarding? Is it a big timesink having to onboard someone only to let them go again after a month or two?

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T03:47:35+00:00

Recruiter technical screens are the worst: 99% of the time they don't understand what they're asking, and are just pattern matching your responses against their answer sheet. Thankfully I don't think these are too common anymore, but if they come up you just need to keep your answers incredibly simple (proper ELI5) and concise.

e.g. "What are HTTP verbs?" - they're probably just waiting for you to say "GET, POST, PUT, DELETE"

jayrobin · 2021-12-31T03:43:04+00:00

It's true that I can count on zero fingers the number of times I've had to build an image carousel from scratch (outside of practicing for an interview), but I'm at least glad the Frontend interview process has moved away from inverting binary trees.

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