Moving in IT/Programming

[jsmoke]

So send CV to agency, didn't even realise they did IT jobs, I have done a few jobs and put that I had some programming and other IT skills and she phones me up quite interested in this - hope I didn't overcook the CV.

So have appointment next week and quite interested in getting into development
although I have no idea have far away I would be from professional development, I suppose an interview with an employer would soon sort that out.

I have never hung about with other programmers/IT people, so it's like working in the dark, on one hand I could be at the level of a script kiddie who can hack a
php/perl page together or a simple dialog box in C#, on the other hand I may be up to the task, I started writing a full C++ Lexer/Parser for example, though stopped after about 600 lines as it was becoming to tedious and repetitive.

I could learn plenty of interview questions. I just have never been put to the test and don't have the CS degree either so I am missing a lot of fundamentals such as algorithms, sorting, cryptography, just all the fundamental programming/hardware theory you would learn in a CS degree.

So I feel like I would blag through it, I could just see me blagging into a job then be totally out of my league.

have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale

What do you think?

 

[jsmoke]

there are developers out there who aren't particularly skilled though a lot of their workload is just writing fixes, maintaining existing code.

I don't see why someone who's been involved in projects in their own time couldn't land a role as a developer - you might well have a better theoretical knowledge than some... what you won't likely have done on your own however is debug, maintain some code someone else has written. Writing your own stuff from scratch is one thing, looking at a big mess of code and trying to fix it is another... if you find a short project tedious then you might well find the average development job tedious - there are plenty of devs out there doing pure grunt work with existing products rather than working on brand new stuff.

I actually have done quite a bit of that, I've ploughed through huge code bases many of times trying to work out what is going on. How about the Nasm source code, the Unreal source, GCC source, many emulators, Qemu source, tons of game engines, Linux drivers etc. But as I said it's hard to gauge the gap between me and a professional developer.

Maybe I should just go freelance or start my own company as most businesses would not have a clue if you wrote hacky code, as long as it works.

The other thing is I know there is a whole techie language as well.

I only meant the parser was tedious as it's just string manipulation, and one function is relatively the same as the next. There's also no need for C++ to write one, should be written in C, I did it to improve my C++ skills but as I said it's a task for C so I wasn't learning anything new.

 

[jsmoke]

The world of professional software development is full of a lot of snobbery, some think everyone has to be an expert/extreme geek from the get go.

Some things that will get you a lot further than you think...personality, social skills, business sense etc. Depends on the company/who is involved in the hiring process of course.

I do understand this to a fair degree, I imagine it's highly competitive, fairly arrogant and full of people trying to get one over on another through their intellectual knowledge/arrogance. Bit like Stock Brokers I would have thought. But there must be plenty of decent people.

Actually we'd decided to make an offer on a guy I interviewed yesterday. I did about 25 phones interviews, 2 in-person interviews and we picked one guy.

It is surprising how few people can even pass a phone interview. Some of them have shinning CVs full of buzzwords, some of them even have positions on their CV that are rather amazing sometime, and can't even answer simple questions about generic things. And even the guys we interviewed in house are not 'fantastic' either; we decided t hire one because 1) we need someone and 2) we hope he will shape up, his "shape-upability" seems better than the other guy.

Do you have any examples questions, I know there are loads on the net, for example I've read a bit of this book,

Interview Questions

some of it is quite funny, also this is quite good,

steveyegge2


These are not just specific programming questions somewhat more of a personality test combo.

I've noticed this book Algorithms For Interviews, had a quick look and this is where I am lacking and it's the most fundamental CS topic there is......