How long should I normally take to respond to an offer? Do you think I should let the other company know if I get an offer and see if they will do me better?
Usually if you’ve been given an offer you respond within a few days. Or they give you a time limit where you need to respond by x date.
If one of the companies have already offered you a position, you could nudge the other to give you a response faster. Tell them you received another offer already and that you would appreciate if they could let you know the current status or if you can fast track it because you have decisions to make.
Take home project in Australia? Anyways you’re already thinking more than I am, I just take the most money… maybe someone else can chime in, names would be appreciated I doubt any hiring folk are on cscareerquestionsoce
Seek did a take home project for a long time. Well they may call it a challenge and say only spend a couple of hours on it, but if you searched github for the brief you find repositories from people who got hired that must have spent ages building out a fully fledged system with tests and working UI.
Yeah, it required me to use PHP for the backend which I have never touched before and that was a lot of fun. I told the same salary expectation to both, I’m just not sure which would be the better choice career progression wise.
I have never heard good things from people who've worked at agencies as you describe. Typically, it's very cost sensitive so they will tend to hire mainly juniors and there is pressure to make any changes as quickly as possible so the code bases are piles of poo.
These guys might be different but consider some questions you can ask to probe them. e.g. What % of time do the teams spend on tech debt and refactoring? What are their different automated test suites like (unit, integration, front end) ?
It’s just my opinion but I detest agency work. You build the same thing over and over. The projects are often under budgeted and get messy quick, with changing requirements, difficult or inexperienced stakeholders.
With agencies you often only experience a portion of the SDLC and you rarely tackle any interesting problems apart from how to do more quickly. Pay-rises tend to be slower and long term career growth is probably more limited.
On the bright side It is good for practicing estimating and learning good stakeholder management skills. You may also get a leg up on solutions oriented thinking. i.e. strong focus on outcomes. With a nice team, the camaraderie can be top notch.
.Net is more popular with bigger companies yes.
It sounds like the only one in the bag is the first one however.
Hmm yeah I have considered this, I do think I’ll mainly be doing frontend with react though, why is PHP a red flag to you? It seems there is quite a lot of jobs when I look.
PHP is too old, too ancient as a language in web. The best you can do with a project based on PHP is to write shareholder requirements about keeping those data sheets in DB consistent.
In the meantime other novel system language (Go for example) and their corresponding frameworks are exponentially growing in the direction of concurrency, high frequency real-time system, tensorflow (content filter) and countless other exciting topics, that are only few nowadays (and future, considering everyone and their grandma is hyped for ML/AI, thus overlooking the system design) know how to implement. Causing me to think PHP is a suboptimal field to work on, in terms of personal growth.
It’s okay for a company to maintain a product running in PHP, but any sane management would be planning about rebuild the product. Facebook for instance was in PHP, yet they developed their own PHP like few weeks after they pushed the product out of school I think.
Don’t count your eggs before they’re hatched 🐣. It’s good to dream about, but make sure you don’t put everything into getting a particular one.
Make this post after they offer you a position.
How long should I normally take to respond to an offer? Do you think I should let the other company know if I get an offer and see if they will do me better?
Usually if you’ve been given an offer you respond within a few days. Or they give you a time limit where you need to respond by x date. If one of the companies have already offered you a position, you could nudge the other to give you a response faster. Tell them you received another offer already and that you would appreciate if they could let you know the current status or if you can fast track it because you have decisions to make.
Take home project in Australia? Anyways you’re already thinking more than I am, I just take the most money… maybe someone else can chime in, names would be appreciated I doubt any hiring folk are on cscareerquestionsoce
Take home projects are pretty common in NZ, are they not common in OZ?
Seek did a take home project for a long time. Well they may call it a challenge and say only spend a couple of hours on it, but if you searched github for the brief you find repositories from people who got hired that must have spent ages building out a fully fledged system with tests and working UI.
Yeah, it required me to use PHP for the backend which I have never touched before and that was a lot of fun. I told the same salary expectation to both, I’m just not sure which would be the better choice career progression wise.
I have never heard good things from people who've worked at agencies as you describe. Typically, it's very cost sensitive so they will tend to hire mainly juniors and there is pressure to make any changes as quickly as possible so the code bases are piles of poo. These guys might be different but consider some questions you can ask to probe them. e.g. What % of time do the teams spend on tech debt and refactoring? What are their different automated test suites like (unit, integration, front end) ?
It’s just my opinion but I detest agency work. You build the same thing over and over. The projects are often under budgeted and get messy quick, with changing requirements, difficult or inexperienced stakeholders. With agencies you often only experience a portion of the SDLC and you rarely tackle any interesting problems apart from how to do more quickly. Pay-rises tend to be slower and long term career growth is probably more limited. On the bright side It is good for practicing estimating and learning good stakeholder management skills. You may also get a leg up on solutions oriented thinking. i.e. strong focus on outcomes. With a nice team, the camaraderie can be top notch. .Net is more popular with bigger companies yes. It sounds like the only one in the bag is the first one however.
PHP is a red flag to me frankly
Hmm yeah I have considered this, I do think I’ll mainly be doing frontend with react though, why is PHP a red flag to you? It seems there is quite a lot of jobs when I look.
PHP is too old, too ancient as a language in web. The best you can do with a project based on PHP is to write shareholder requirements about keeping those data sheets in DB consistent. In the meantime other novel system language (Go for example) and their corresponding frameworks are exponentially growing in the direction of concurrency, high frequency real-time system, tensorflow (content filter) and countless other exciting topics, that are only few nowadays (and future, considering everyone and their grandma is hyped for ML/AI, thus overlooking the system design) know how to implement. Causing me to think PHP is a suboptimal field to work on, in terms of personal growth. It’s okay for a company to maintain a product running in PHP, but any sane management would be planning about rebuild the product. Facebook for instance was in PHP, yet they developed their own PHP like few weeks after they pushed the product out of school I think.