My friend is a technically strong professional ( 10+ years) but all her career had been in Networking ( Switches, NAS, Routers). She is a guru of C/C++ Data Structures, Algorithms, etc. She now wants to move to application development world( Googles, and FBs, Java, nodeJs etc). She is having trouble acing interviews due to her hesitation in Java. Is there any advice she can use or resources she can use to prepare?
She is not on blind and I was just talking to her so I thought of posting! Does this help?
If she's a C/C++ guru, I can hardly see a reason why Java would be a big issue at all. Most companies don't care much about it, as long as you can learn fast and express your will to do so.
Almost no one cares how proficient you are with a more "difficult" language such as C++ during a coding interview unless maybe specialized fields. Please do herself a favor and pick up either Python (closest thing to pseudo-code) or Java.
i would 300% rather hire someone good at c++ than another language, all else being equal (it’s usually not). i consistently see candidates who were willing to learn C++ perform much much better than the other two, and knowing C++ forces you to understand how computers work, how to manage memory, etc
if you’re going to be a good software engineer, you need to understand how things work under the hood. it doesn’t matter if you’re writing performance critical things or not - under the hood knowledge enables cross functional collaboration, oncall / incident response skills, debugging skills - doesn’t matter if you’re frontend or backend or full stack or whatever other specialization. if you’re working with computers, you need to understand how computers work, and C++ teaches that 30000x better than java or python. it’s also significantly more concise and gives you a lot more control for algorithms interviews (yes, more concise than python - in python you do so many more extra passes over a list / use so much more memory with its syntactic sugar, even with iterators / generators in python 3, and i havent seen anyone come close to that mastery of python during an interview)
Why does her skills in Java matter when every company will gladly let her use C++ to interview?
Big companies rarely recruit based on language and more focused on testing coding skills. She should practice interview coding questions and also try to transfer at her current work place.
tell her to motherfucking interview in C++. always interview in the language you’re most comfortable with if it’s not an esoteric one
if you’re good at algorithms and data structures, and you’re good at a popular language, using some other language isn’t just shooting yourself in the foot, it’s sawing off your legs below the knees for no reason
if she’s applying to jobs that are tightly coupled to a specific language (Senior Java Dev, etc), don’t fucking apply to those jobs, 90% of them are 1) shit, 2) less money for less flexibility, and 3) unless there’s some insanely good reason to use only that language and hire people for only that language (there usually isn’t), it means the company makes poor technical decisions
Thanks so much for all your insight and comments. My friend got some much needed confirmation of her own beliefs and I think she is going to stick to her core strengths like Networking, Algorithms and System Design without bogging herself down on Java! Also she joined Blind now! 👍
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Why is she not able to post this question herself ?