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Software Programmer's Guide: How to land your next job from search to success
This guide is going to enable you to share in the same successes I've had pursuing better career opportunities. In my 14 year career as a programmer I've changed jobs seven times. I've worked on both sides of the interview process. I've received a lot of praise about my resume writing and interview skills from various industry representatives. I've helped friends and co-workers with the processes as well. Let me help show you how to get it done.
The focus is on the big picture covering everything from efficiently searching for jobs, writing a programming tailored resume, overcoming programmer stereotypes during the interview, negotiating salary, all the way to turning in your resignation.
It’s written for entry level programmers and up so there are tips every programmer can use. Though with all the widely applicable advice anyone reading the guide is going to walk away with tips and guidance well worth the read.
** Sample Excerpt **
Make sure to take time for the little things. The goal of the technical interview process isn’t to see if you can solve a menial problem you’ll never see in the real world, it’s to find out what you know and how much you know about it.
Common areas ignored
•Naming conventions.
•Object scope/responsibility.
•Exception handling.
So let’s look at an example… One common interview algorithm is to write code that finds the first X number of prime numbers. There’s the basic math knowledge you need to know like what a prime number is, but some finer points like only needing to check division by prime numbers up to the square root of the number you’re checking.
To
•First three prime numbers are 2, 3, and 5.
•The square of 3 is 9 and the square of 5 is 25.
•That means the numbers 10 through 24 only need to attempt to divide by 2 and 3 to validate if it’s prime.
Using this knowledge can be impressive. It does show general intelligence and in an algorithm it will lead to better efficiency, but are you ever going to implement a prime number search method in production code? Do you think they’re going to hire you more for math skills or real world programming considerations?
No matter how smart you are it’s not going to mean shit if you don’t handle exceptions or scope out your objects and methods appropriately. It’s more impressive to do things like declare constants such as NumberOfPrimes, include an IsPrimeNumber method outside of the main loop, and catching/throwing errors where appropriate.
If you don’t take the time to do them the interviewer isn’t going to see what you’re really made of. I would also expand the discussions of these topics to flex any higher level understanding you have of them. Include hypothetical scenarios and work experiences so you can tie chalkboard examples like algorithms you’ll never implement to real world examples you’re bound to encounter.
Exception handling is actually a very easy segue into real world issues. In whiteboard examples you’re often going to be catching trivial exceptions, but as soon as you start writing code to handle an exception you can tie into much larger discussion points like why you want to avoid catching general exceptions.
The focus is on the big picture covering everything from efficiently searching for jobs, writing a programming tailored resume, overcoming programmer stereotypes during the interview, negotiating salary, all the way to turning in your resignation.
It’s written for entry level programmers and up so there are tips every programmer can use. Though with all the widely applicable advice anyone reading the guide is going to walk away with tips and guidance well worth the read.
** Sample Excerpt **
Make sure to take time for the little things. The goal of the technical interview process isn’t to see if you can solve a menial problem you’ll never see in the real world, it’s to find out what you know and how much you know about it.
Common areas ignored
•Naming conventions.
•Object scope/responsibility.
•Exception handling.
So let’s look at an example… One common interview algorithm is to write code that finds the first X number of prime numbers. There’s the basic math knowledge you need to know like what a prime number is, but some finer points like only needing to check division by prime numbers up to the square root of the number you’re checking.
To
•First three prime numbers are 2, 3, and 5.
•The square of 3 is 9 and the square of 5 is 25.
•That means the numbers 10 through 24 only need to attempt to divide by 2 and 3 to validate if it’s prime.
Using this knowledge can be impressive. It does show general intelligence and in an algorithm it will lead to better efficiency, but are you ever going to implement a prime number search method in production code? Do you think they’re going to hire you more for math skills or real world programming considerations?
No matter how smart you are it’s not going to mean shit if you don’t handle exceptions or scope out your objects and methods appropriately. It’s more impressive to do things like declare constants such as NumberOfPrimes, include an IsPrimeNumber method outside of the main loop, and catching/throwing errors where appropriate.
If you don’t take the time to do them the interviewer isn’t going to see what you’re really made of. I would also expand the discussions of these topics to flex any higher level understanding you have of them. Include hypothetical scenarios and work experiences so you can tie chalkboard examples like algorithms you’ll never implement to real world examples you’re bound to encounter.
Exception handling is actually a very easy segue into real world issues. In whiteboard examples you’re often going to be catching trivial exceptions, but as soon as you start writing code to handle an exception you can tie into much larger discussion points like why you want to avoid catching general exceptions.
96 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 1, 2015
2 people want to read
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