I have a BS degree in Materials Engineering. I went back to school to change my career to software development. My engineering school has a certificate program for BS degreed engineers to change careers to computer science. I spent the last couple of years completing this program with a 3.8 gpa. I am in a pretty decent market for sof...
Based on this trend chart from indeed.com, Rails vs Django job openings my impression is that Rails currently has more openings but that Django is gaining popularity. Does anyone have personal experience in the job market or additional data to support this idea? ...
what are the recruiter job posting policies that the mailing lists you belong to use? I belong to a user group that meets in person once a week and also has mailing list. Recently we were getting spammed by a recruiter so the list banned their account. anyone experienced this and if so, how have you handled it? ...
I am a developer in a region that is not exactly a hot spot for IT. I have an Associates degree from a community college and I have over 7 years experience programming. So, this leads to the core of the question... What are some keys to selling your talents when you only a resume and if fortunate, an hour of someone's time to se...
A recent chat with some ex-colleagues (who had gone on to bigger and better things) went something like this: Coll 1 (an admin): "If my app goes down, I'll have to rebuild the databases" Coll 2 (IT manager in a cosmetic company): "If my app goes down we have to scrap the production run and restart" Coll 3 (IT manager for high street b...
Stackoverflow helps, but what else you suggest to keep your skills fresh, even if you try hard to invest part of your free time studying the new technologies, If you want to move on, recruiters used to focus on your immediate previous laboral experience and it becomes hard to demostrate that you are updated ...
I have an interview with a possible employer next monday, I'll code friday, saturday and sunday, just because I need the job (first one) and I like to code. The thing is I need a good project idea that I could show to him. I know OOP, design patterns, good practices, etc., but I have not a portfolio since it is my first job; most of my c...
After reading "Dealbreakers for new programming jobs?" I was thinking about those "I own you"-contracts. To cite Chris Jester-Young: The lack of ability to own code I write on my personal time, on my personal machine, that are not related to anything work-related. I have never seen something like that. I mean we are payed to write...
In 6 months I will be a graduate and pursuing a masters in computers for the next 2 years in India. My options after that are to either do a post graduation (again) from a reputed college abroad, or to take up a job. Recently I came to know about about global certification programs like ccna, ccnp, ccie, oca, ocp, j2se, mcse, mcp etc. ...
For some or other reason I have never liked to learn or program with Databases (ok nothing more than average SQL queries). Are there any programmer jobs in cloud computing that won't need involve working with DB on a day to day basis. I did try to look around some job sites but that did not help much. Edit notes: going by the down ...
Please excuse the subjective nature of this question but I'm trying to determine whether to focus on PHP for my next job search because I'm looking for a less formal work environment. Do I have an impression that PHP jobs tend to be in less formal work environments such as smaller companies/startups with more of a progressive attitude? ...
When companies place job ads, they often ask for "X years of experience in Y". My understanding is that when they say this, they mean professional experience. They don't want to hear about my years as a C++ hobbyist before I started my day job, they just want to know what I've used on-the-job, on a commercial project. Right? So, how doe...
If you write and maintain your own personal technical blog should that be listed in your resume? Any reasons not to? Would this be of interest to potential employers or would they be indifferent? If you do include it, how and where would you mention it? ...
I am a junior computer engineering student and will graduate a semester early (December of 2009). I have started applying to jobs and have had a couple of interviews. Two of my internships were in web development and I want to showcase some of my work online. I'm thinking about starting a 'blog' or an online 'portfolio' type of website....
Back in 2000, I got a bunch of programming certifications from Brainbench. However, they didn't seem to be doing me any good, and they needed to be renewed every year, so I let them lapse. Recently I've been hearing more about Brainbench, and I've been wondering - do these certifications impress potential employers at all, in 2009? What ...
Hello everyone, I'm in the process of trying to move on from my current employer. It is a small college with a very small student population. I've moved around a bit inside the IT department there to fill needs and experience a few things outside of programming. In the process of my job search, I've had a few interviews that were for j...
I've received 100+ recruiter calls in the last month, had about 10 tel screens, 5 in-person interviews. Finally landed a short-term gig. This was in the Seattle market for C#/.Net. What has your experience been? ...
Imagine someone who loves system building and design, issues of code reusability and maintenance, and knows many languages, tools and tricks. But he doesn't like pure algorithms, questions about permutations, runtime analysis or the intricacies of sort algorithms. Can that person still be a good software engineer / developer? If yes, d...
I have left jobs immediately in the past because the environment seemed like something I could not handle. One job I literally ran away screaming - took lunch and never came back - because the environment seemed dead; there was no communication among the programming "team" I was a part of, just a bunch of guys with their heads down typin...
As far as I can see Solutions Architect is just a different "marketing" term for Applications Architect. Is that correct or are the roles actually different somehow? If so, how? And yes, I have searched for this both on StackOverflow and on Google. ...