Senior Developer Interviews: Tales from the Trenches

From my experience as a Junior Software Engineer and Java Developer, since there is such high demand for software developers as soon as you qualify for a job in the field you have a pretty good chance of landing one in short order.  Trying to go for a Senior Developer job broke the mold in a number of ways.

First off, people rise up through the pay grades for the first two levels pretty rapidly, which means that you're competing with people with approximately your experience level.  However, people with TEN years experience can be applying for a Senior Developer job.  This of course means that the required 5+ years experience is going to put your résumé not looking too hot on paper.  However, you can tell yourself that you "punch above your weight" so you'll impress them on the purely technical side.  Easier said than done as they say.

In the first two tiers, you're treated as a technical specialist.  You just have to be an expert in JavaScript OR Java OR SQL, and you're not even really expected to know in detail how those fussy clusters of computers with their web containers work in detail, that's IT's job right?  Not at the Senior level though.  You're expected to be able to prance about the entire software stack with ease and grace.  Saying that the JavaScript prototype concept is kinda like Java inheritance and leaving at that isn't going to cut it.  Confusing your jQuery with your XPath is not going to cut it.  Not knowing how to make a Java Singleton a true Singleton when deployed to a clustered environment isn't going to cut it.  Not knowing the difference between an inner and outer SQL joins isn't going to cut it.  Not knowing the details of your web containers' class loader isn't going to cut it.  On top of all of this, you're expected to have excellent soft skills at this level as well.

Just getting over social anxiety by taking a metric ton of Prozac every day is just the preliminaries of the soft skills you're going to need.  In addition to being able to charm people ("Hay!  I thought engineers were allowed to be socially awkward!"  Nope) and having the standard "Excellent Written and Verbal Communication Skills" where you thought communication skills were being able to feign interest in Steve's ukulele collection and your bosses Whole Foods shopping, veiled "spirituality" references and superstitious neo-hippy quasi-Eastern bull****, but also be able to orate and deliver technical speeches / presentations and be able to handle yourself in the office-politics charged meetings that you'll be invited to more and more. All the while keeping your code throughput high and keeping your inboxes at 0 (you also should have read Getting Things Done by now, or the context switching will require a few buckets of daily anti-psychotics as well).  Did I mention a strong social media presence and a great Klout score too?

In summary to snag that $100k+ Senior Developer job you won't just need to hone your existing skill sets, but learn many additional ones as well.  You will need to possibly hold a regular Programmer position until you have 8-10 years experience.  You will need to know the entire software stack to the point of being a quasi-superhero of computation.  Lastly you will need truly overwhelming social skills, including conducting presentations, giving prepared speeches and attending and holding meetings.  All in all, I have about 7,000 pages of books queued up to read to bring myself up to these levels, because possibly the most valuable skill you can have is being able to rise to a challenge.

Drinking from the Firehose... again...

If you don't know, drinking from the firehose means that you are inundated with information and need to parse through and absorb it quickly.  Most typically it occurs in a difficult course or changing jobs.  Changing to starting your own company is no exception.

First order of business is almost always a business plan, but since I never "got" business plans  I picked up my first For Dummies book, Business Plans Kit for Dummies.  It's straightforward and reads like a work book, I'm finding it super useful so far.

Going through it is still exhausting and reminds me of a difficult college course, but it's worth it to pick up a new and highly needed skill.

Adventures in Certification & New Ads

There is a great forum topic about the Oracle Certified Associate, Java test over at DreamInCode that gives a good overview of what to expect.

Also expect subtle ads from VigLink (see icon) from here on in when I blatantly plug products like encouraging people to not pirate their Adobe software.

Developers and Testers: Breaking Down the Wall

Over at TheServerSide they pointed out an insightful article at Neotys.com on how to get testers and developers to get along and understand each other better.

The salient points were that how easy the testing tool can adapt to change is a big deal, and that having devs go through some QA training to be able to "think like" QA can be beneficial.

Wordpress & XAMPP

So, if you're not familiar XAMPP is an all-in-one solution running on multiple platforms (X), Apache, MySql, Perl and PHP (and Tomcat).  I've used this well for PHP development before back around 2006.

However when I went to use this to host a local Wordpress instance for development purposes I kept getting an invalid database connection message.  After hours of struggle and frustration, wikihow had a great article with a step by step tutorial on this.  It turned out my DB encoding was wrong (thanks regular tutorial and error messages for being so obtuse!).

Freelancing & News

Ah, the Brave New (to me) World of freelancing.  I already have an old friend who started a business and needs some work done, but for additional work I evaluated some of the freelancing sites: freelancer, odesk & elance.  It looks like the general pay-scale of the work offered indicates that freelancer is more for the inexpensive end of the market, odesk is the mid-range and elance has some well paid work there.  I bet a bunch of people contract on elance and then subcontract on odesk or freelancer.

As for the impending ads that were mentioned in an earlier post, they will be delayed indefinitely; read on in peace!

From whatmyfriendsthinkido.net

Adventures in Certification: The Journey Begins

At a certain point in your career you may realize that you've specialized on accident, so you may as well "cert up" and go with it.

That was my exact situation, so after a bit of study found out that the Java starting certification is currently (Jan 2013) the Java SE 7 Certification.  Achieving this bestows the title of Oracle Certified Associate (OCA) Java SE 7 (aka OCAJ).  The old Java 6 equivalent appears to still be called a Sun certification, so that caused me some confusion that I hope to spare the reader.  Achieving the cert involves passing the 1Z0-803 exam, and this goes for under $500 USD so it's relatively reasonable given how much the further certs go for.

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How to prepare was a bit vexing as well; an initial Googling of the exam number revealed a few scammy websites at first, the following sites all have poor reviews or prominent ripoffreport rankings: selftestengine.com (self test engine review), actualtests.com(actualtests reviews), pass4sure.com (pass4sure reviews) & realtests.com (realtests reviews).  You DO want to pick up a book on it.  I'm going through the OCA Java SE 7 Programmer I Study Guide by McGraw Hill just to brush up on the basics again.

Lastly, on a different note I'm making the plunge into freelancing, so I finally had to break and put in AdSense ads.  I hope that people find this informative and thanks for reading!