This is my guess, I have no direct knowledge here.
Imperial College London's "Computing" degree is described at https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/courses/undergraduate/compu... as a program where you can "study the engineering of computer hardware and software alongside the mathematical principles of computing." So it's not just computer science. Compare this to the "Electrical Engineering and Computer Science" (EECS) degrees at MIT, UC Berkeley and other places.
As for changing the name on your CV/resume, whether that's okay depends on the hiring customs for your location and field. That said, I think you're overthinking it. Prestigious schools and employers and people sometimes use unusual names as a mark of distinction. You can get a "Computer Science" degree from any fifth-rate night school, but all the fancy employers you'll presumably be eligible for after graduating should know what a "Computing" degree from Imperial College London is.
...so that special Computing title for the true Computer Science course is doubly unusual. You're probably right that I'm overthinking it though, and maybe subconsciously looking for reasons to "productively procrastinate" rather than actually doing the research and making the decisions I need to.
I'm not sure it's a good trade-off to interview constantly even when you have a job just to remove a bit of the learning curve if you lose your job unexpectedly.
I recommend it. For me, unused skills will become inaccessible relatively quickly, and interviews require a specific set that aren't used at all in any of my jobs over the years.
Once, I did heavy interview prep because I was bored with my job at the time, I got good at it, and landed another better job.
A year later my company deleted entire orgs of people, and I quickly realized that I was in bad shape when my third rejection rolled in.
Interviews are high pressure situations. Better to be used to the flow, coding, and conversation style (again, think "sales") than to be caught off guard, worrying about whether you've solved a Leetcode question fast enough to satisfy another human with their own grading quirks.
Oh, and that person is standing between you and a steady paycheck. That's the part I have to practice anyway, solving stupid university final problems when my livelihood is on the line.
It's a good idea to practice if you're trying to get up the nerve to make the jump to a better job. But during a job search, you'll either get so many rejections that you'll get back up to speed quickly enough without needing to also obsess about it while you're employed, or you're hireable enough that you didn't need to worry about it either way.
Being unemployed, I can't support this. Keeping an offer on hold blocks the company from making the offer to someone else who actively needs it. Maybe you meant something else, like a handshake agreement with a manager friend who works there that they'll try to make room for you if you ever want to join.
All else equal, people with resume gaps are going to get sorted to the bottom of the pile. Maybe at the high end of the market, the FAANG staff level, there aren't enough applicants so it's not a big deal, and they'll get to those applications eventually. At the lower end of the market however, there's more competition and more likelihood that someone else from the top of the pile will get hired before they get down to the bottom.
There's really no way to hide you're currently unemployed, or at least not employed in the tech field, unless you make up an entire fantasy world. Not only will you have to put the lie into your resume, and maybe provide fake references, but you'll also get tons of interview questions about skills and projects and challenges from your current job.
>"There's really no way to hide you're currently unemployed"
It is absolutely trivial.
>"but you'll also get tons of interview questions about skills and projects and challenges from your current job"
Your last job unless it is 10 years old should provide all of the answers. Any really identifying details should not be asked / answered as the employee is normally under NDA.
Same for references. Reference from "current job" can simply be refused. I can hardly imagine employee going to their boss and asking for a job reference while still working.
Anyways I am independent and run my own company. Maybe I am not up to date about how deep the US employers are able to stick their fingers up that proverbial hole.
While interviewing in the U.S. you'll get a lot of casual questions about your current job, such as what you like best about it, what skills you use there or why you want to leave. These will come from the recruiter, the manager and your future peers. These are both technical and social questions. Refusing to answer any of these questions would be very weird socially, and even very restrictive NDAs should allow you to at least speak generally about what you're doing.
>"While interviewing in the U.S. you'll get a lot of casual questions about your current job, such as what you like best about it, what skills you use there or why you want to leave. "
These fall perfectly into experience with last job. Does not have to be current. And all those questions you asked are trivial. Also I've never dealt with the recruiters. I have always searched and found perspective companies myself and no they were not Amazon big type. If I could not speak with the owner I would simply walk away - not my kind of place.
My first programming job in Canada - I just simply walked into the office and asked to speak to the owner (I knew it was small 20 person consultancy).
Since 2000 I am on my own but I still find clients and have interviews. Just a different type of interview of course.
It's important to quantify how long your time off was for this anecdote to be meaningful. No good employer will bat an eye if you worked at a place for five years then spent three months on a tropical beach. A year spent job searching with no luck like the OP is a different situation altogether.
I actually don't think that's as much of a problem as you'd think - I did nine months off after 2.5 years. I just wouldn't say you've been searching and not getting jobs - much better to say that you've interviewed at a few places, but you're very focused on finding a company whose mission and team you're excited about (particularly if that's true). If they accept that as true, then you're creating a positive sort of scarcity of yourself, as opposed to framing it as jobs being scarce and you being desperate for one.
In very large part what your interviews look like depends heavily on when and where you're searching, what type of job you want and what your background is. It's hard to overstate this. 2018 might as well be an entirely different universe.
That said I would be a little suspicious as a mid/senior-level developer if I got hired at a place that didn't ask me to do any coding for them at all beforehand.
20+ years in. Don't be afraid those positions can lead to a greenfield development project or come from departments that don't have someone to vet your coding preferences. Usually these positions offer more technical freedom. A company who spends more time vetting code will generally be a place with less freedom and more micromanagement.
> That said I would be a little suspicious as a mid/senior-level developer if I got hired at a place that didn't ask me to do any coding for them at all beforehand.
I'd be suspicious if they didn't ask me to do any coding, but I'd be just as suspicious if the coding they asked me to do was leetcode.
While it annoys me as well to have to brush up a little, someone who has both the discipline to review their fundamentals, and that can demonstrate they have the smarts to be good at it, that's a great sign of being a good candidate.
It serves as a great arbiter, if two people seem to have the same experience, how do you pick between the two?
And when hiring a junior, out of school, there will be no experience to go by, so what else would you assess on?
> Why are you opposed to leetcode?
> It serves as a great arbiter
I'm opposed because I don't think it serves as a great arbiter. At best, it selects for logical/academic ability, whereas IMO the most important skill as engineer is pragmatic decision making and building an appropriate solution. In practice it just selects for people who have studied leetcode (and to a lesser extent, those who have a CS degree)
> if two people seem to have the same experience, how do you pick between the two?
> And when hiring a junior, out of school, there will be no experience to go by, so what else would you assess on?
You use a technical challenge that resembles the work that the person would need to fulfil in the job. Perhaps creating a single view of a website/app for a frontend role. Or creating a few API endpoints for a backend role. Or whiteboarding through a technical architecture (with plenty of opportunity to ask clarifying questions).
> Perhaps creating a single view of a website/app for a frontend role. Or creating a few API endpoints for a backend role
Those things are relatively trivial, and easy to coach as well. If someone never did it before, you can easily show them how on the job. You also wouldn't have time to have them work that in an interview, so you'd need to do a take home, and then you can no longer validate they truly did it themselves, how much time they spent to do it, how much googling they had to do, how they approach the problem or delt with issues, etc.
I also find they tend to be framework/language specific, some companies even have internal frameworks and all that so they'd have to relearn part of it anyways.
> Or whiteboarding through a technical architecture
This is normally included as part of a "leetcode" like interview.
It tends to be a half day, where you're asked one or two system design questions, which are of the format you describe, and are asked one or two data structure and algorithms questions, and one or two small programming questions that checks your ability to write readable and maintainable code that is well structured, well organized and well factored. Sometimes the latter two are combined into one bigger question that tests both code design quality and requires an algorithm or special use of data structures to solve.
I'm sometimes involved in the interviewing process for my employer and we don't do any kind of coding tests. We do ask for them to submit a sample of their work and use it in the interview. I ask questions about the problem and about how they solved it. The code itself isn't usually that interesting, but the tangents we wander down usually are. If the person can't communicate well about a technical topic that they essentially chose, then they probably won't get an offer.
That said, I work for a small company and our turnover is pretty low. I haven't been involved in all that many hires.
This is pretty close to what my experience has been on the interviewee side. The conversations have been technical in regards to talking through problem solving, and esoteric coding philosophy conversations over lunch.
The only coding exams I've ever had to submit were while working at consulting agencies for clients that require an interview process to pick what the client regards as the best candidates for the contract.
I also worked at "very small" (15 dev consultants) to "medium-small" (300 or so technical consultants) companies, hence why I was curious if this was a bigconsulting thing or not.
So far it hasn’t been a problem. Junior candidates have shown code from a school project and others have submitted code from a personal project or from something they contributed to an open source project. I think the personal projects are the most interesting to talk about.
Expecting people to have personal projects outside work is very much selecting for a certain type of person. You're ruling out people who devote their time outside work to their families, or sport, or hobbies that don't involve programming.
I’m not ruling out anything. So far I have yet to find somebody who can’t come up with a code sample to bring to the interview. When that happens, I would probably give them a (paid) assignment. Maybe something like “fix issue #12345 on open source project X”. I’d have to think about it a little and discuss it with the candidate.
I would only hope to use that as a substitute for paid employment if you actually incorporate, give yourself a title, put your company on LinkedIn and otherwise treat it like a business. Noodling around on a side project that you might monetize eventually is not a substitute.
I disagree. Incorporating, giving yourself a title, and a LinkedIn page are things anyone can do. People who "play business" spend tons of time on this stuff, along with designing company logos, hiring accountants (for their zero revenue business), and lawyers (for NDAs to protect their non-existent idea.) I've seen it first hand. They'll do anything to avoid actual work: building and selling a product.
I suspect what Anon means is: if you plan to tell people your side project was your job, you should start treating it as your job.
I play around with some side projects where I don’t give a shit about user counts or GitHub stars or commercial viability, doing perhaps 4 hours work per week. If I told people this was me at the height of my powers, I’d expect them to be unimpressed.
Yes, exactly, I'm saying that what will matter to future employers is how much you treat the project as a job, and not the project itself, no matter how interesting or challenging it is from the technical side.
It won't matter as much as you think. They'll probably spend 5 minutes discussing it, if that. If you have a demo or something to show for your time, that will be a plus.
In my experience you're overstating the need to be able to instantly brain dump complex algorithms, except maybe at the FAANG level where I have no experience. It's far more important to be comfortable solving any simple coding challenge on demand in front of people in a high-stakes situation like an interview.
I think it's healthier to instead develop the social skills and confidence needed to answer any questions confidently while enforcing boundaries about what you will and won't answer. Outright lying can come from a place of weakness and fear which isn't good to encourage.
Let me give you an example: you're gay and your employer has a thing about gay people. They will not ask you outright 'are you gay?' because that, while legal might result in an anti discrimination suit upon rejection of the candidate which they could very well lose.
Lots of other situations and questions like that which are strictly speaking none of the employer's business. When given the option between telling the truth, evading the question, enforcing your boundaries or lying the only one that might result in you getting the job (assuming you need a job and wouldn't mind working for a bigot because a paycheck is better than no paycheck) I'd be fine with you lying. That is still problematic, but you don't have any moral responsibility towards your employer if they transgress themselves.
The same goes for questions about unionizing, wanting children, having chronic diseases and so on.
Maybe you picked being gay as a hypothetical out of a hat but it's a terrible example. Unless we're talking about extremely repressive societies where there are literally no professional options available for LGBT people, almost no LGBT person would recommend going back into the closet to find work with a bigoted employer. LGBT people regularly run away from home as teenagers and become homeless to avoid bigotry, that's how serious it can be for LGBT people to live authentically. A key part of the emotional growth involved, what a lot of it goes back to is, as I said, having confidence in yourself and being willing to enforce boundaries.
Leaving aside this particularly bad hypothetical, lying about yourself to get a job probably won't set you up for long-term success. What's the end game of claiming you don't want kids when you really do, after you get the job and then become pregnant? Now you need the job even more and your employer both resents you being pregnant and for having lied to them.
If you're really saying it's okay to lie to employers if you're truly desperate, then sure, why not. If you're actually starving then a lot of things become options, but this isn't really good long-term career advice.
You’ve drastically shifted the goal posts from the topic of “are you looking at other companies?” to discrimination. It’s hard to have any meaningful insight with those in the same bucket.
The former is completely standard procedural (do we need to accelerate the process to compete) and competitive (who are we up against).
Imperial College London's "Computing" degree is described at https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/courses/undergraduate/compu... as a program where you can "study the engineering of computer hardware and software alongside the mathematical principles of computing." So it's not just computer science. Compare this to the "Electrical Engineering and Computer Science" (EECS) degrees at MIT, UC Berkeley and other places.
As for changing the name on your CV/resume, whether that's okay depends on the hiring customs for your location and field. That said, I think you're overthinking it. Prestigious schools and employers and people sometimes use unusual names as a mark of distinction. You can get a "Computer Science" degree from any fifth-rate night school, but all the fancy employers you'll presumably be eligible for after graduating should know what a "Computing" degree from Imperial College London is.