I was in college when the dot-com craze began. A friend of mine was working for a local ISP which was in way over their heads with clients needing website development. So, I pretty much fell into it. I did a lot of pro-bono work to build up my portfolio and low-balled a lot of my quotes to create a large client base. I was subcontracted with that company for about two years and, after, took my resume and portfolio to New York City and pretty much had my pick. I settled on a dot-com that sold cell phones, pagers, Dish Network, DirectTV, etc. That was my first salaried position.
Although I usually put a lot of work into my resume, I'd have to say that it's the portfolio that wins over prospective employers every time.
You first programming job
Quote:Original post by Winegums
I don't want to sidetrack this thread, but on that programming test..Quote:
5. Given the inputs 1 and 0, write 4 different functions that will return the opposite number from the input given.
int myFunc(int input x)
{
if(x == 0)
return 1;
else
return 0;
}
Since if/else was used in the example, you cannot use it in your functions.
I'm stuck!
I can come up with 3 methods...
A switch block.
Subtract 1 from x and return it's absolute value.
Use a while loop i.e. while(x){ return 0;} return 1;
But that's all I've got. I think maybe some sort of bitwise operation might give you the fourth, but I'm not nearly strong enough with that stuff to give an example (this test has highlighted several areas in which i need to brush up!).
Here's what I got.
return(!x);
return(x==0);
return(x!=1);
I was having trouble thinking of one more, but when I saw the comment about bitwise, I realized this would work.
return(x^1);
Those are all pretty similar, but I think that's what he's looking for.
I decided to send an email to a company in Lund Sweden, got an interview, did the interview, got the job.
Quote:Original post by coderx75
I was in college when the dot-com craze began. A friend of mine was working for a local ISP which was in way over their heads with clients needing website development. So, I pretty much fell into it.
Same here. Good times, everyone with a pulse was able to get a job in IT.
Quote:Original post by the_edd
Demos > C.V.
I showed my first employer a game I was working on. It was only half finished, but it left no doubt that I knew my arse from my elbow. This is almost never the case with a C.V.
Damn skippy. I gave a talk at my old college on how to make a good impression with an employer. Basically, I told them to burn everything they have ever coded on to a CD, write up a readme file and hand it to them along side your resume. Personally, I always show them my game engine. It is not remotely close to being done, and all it does, is show a window, but there is over 10,000 lines of code in it that does things from Math, collision detection, setting up shaders and a renderer, It has networking and sound support, etc. They don't care if it runs, they will be impressed by the shear fact that you can muster an hour or two a day to code something like this. Its called discipline and they eat it up.
I also tell them since it does not show anything impressive, they can use it as an example of my programming style and knowledge. Its well commented and its very clean code. It at least gets your foot in the door and gives the employer something technical to reference, which is hard to do on an interview level.
At my first college we were required to get an internship with a local company and do some kind of website program for them. I applied to this local company and built them a website to list vacation home rentals (similar to AutoTrader or those car listing sites). Since I have summer jobs and school year jobs (since I live in a different city for school) I have 2 other website programming jobs since then.
My 2nd programming job they gave me a big sheet of paper (like poster paper or something, all I know is it was wider and much longer) for a test. It was a big chunk of code from some web app written in original ASP (not .NET) and I was told to write the comments in. I can't get to that game dev test but I can imagine from what it sounds like that it is much harder than mine :)
My 2nd programming job they gave me a big sheet of paper (like poster paper or something, all I know is it was wider and much longer) for a test. It was a big chunk of code from some web app written in original ASP (not .NET) and I was told to write the comments in. I can't get to that game dev test but I can imagine from what it sounds like that it is much harder than mine :)
Quote:
Here's what I got.
return(!x);
return(x==0);
return(x!=1);
I was having trouble thinking of one more, but when I saw the comment about bitwise, I realized this would work.
return(x^1);
Those are all pretty similar, but I think that's what he's looking for.
There's always:
return ( x == 0 ) ? 1 : 0;Doesn't actually use if/else. :p
In response to the original post, my first programming job after college (and currently my second one, and I only finished my Bachelor's last spring) have both been pretty mundane. All documentation, no programming at all yet for me. Mainly running tests on code that's been written for years already. Both were contractor positions (through a middle man) and left my first job after the contract ended and they offered me full time because I wanted to get more into the development side of things which this position promised. Still haven't even seen code at my second job; at least at my first job I was able to write small test apps to directly test the production code. Ah, the joys of the corporate development ladder. Sigh.
Both positions pretty much fell into my lap. I was looking for other positions and I was just contacted out of the blue by agencies - I had my resume on the local job finding website rather than a national one like Monster. Both positions were called, interviewed, and hired within a two to three day span. If you're really scrambling to try and find a job, doesn't hurt to try and go the contracting route temporarily.
[Edited by - CaspianB on June 16, 2008 2:07:08 PM]
Quote:Original post by WanMasterQuote:Original post by coderx75
I was in college when the dot-com craze began. A friend of mine was working for a local ISP which was in way over their heads with clients needing website development. So, I pretty much fell into it.
Same here. Good times, everyone with a pulse was able to get a job in IT.
No kidding! I was even making money on the side training people that were TRYING to be web designers/developers and had made promises on things they couldn't pull off. I'd charge extra for fix-up jobs if they were done in Frontpage. *shutter*
Ah, I miss the days when people threw money at me with little expectations. Welp, guess it's back to work! =b
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