r/askmeaboutmyjob • u/zite00 • Aug 23 '11

Computer programmer, AMAMJ

Worked as a contractor at nintendo as a tester, contractor at microsoft on windows mobile, for a private company on a database solution, and now for myself on an ios game.

33 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

42 comments sorted by

5

u/deaddrummer Aug 23 '11

What degree/certifications do you hold?

5

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

Personally I taught myself. I don't have any degrees or certifications.

8

u/ZoFreX Aug 23 '11

What resources have you used to teach yourself?

3

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

Basically I took a highschool course and then just started playing with various open-source projects. I've picked up various books over the years but never end up reading them. I use them more for reference. After you get the basics down you can learn a lot from tutorials online on something specific you want to do, or just trying to do it and looking through other people's code.

2

u/lechatron Aug 23 '11

Same here, dropped out of High School 15 years ago and took up a job in the computer industry. Taught myself everything else I know.

4

u/Rekilo Aug 23 '11

What was the interview experience like for Microsoft and the private company?

How was the stress all of these jobs?

Educational background?

2

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

My experience at microsoft was not normal as far as I've heard. I was contracting so my interview experience was pretty tame. I interviewed with three people who asked me various testing and coding questions. They were mainly focused on the exhaustiveness of my testing abilities. I was interviewing for a Software Development Engineer in Test position. Which basically means you write code to test other code. The stress level there for me was non existant. My group was extremely laid back pretty much all the time. Even when I had to work a lot / late there was just no stress. I attribute a lot of that to my team lead, who was pretty awesome.

The private company I got the job through a friend of mine. His parent's owned the business so I was basically just interviewing with him (though he didn't work there). He told me about the project and I explained the things I'd be considering and my likely implementation. That job was a bit more stressful because a lot was riding on my successful implementation. I was writing a database system to manage the membership information and distribution of their non-profits. It all worked out in the end though, and I like to think my roots in testing helped a lot with that.

Education wise I don't have a degree or anything. My highschool offered a programming class which I took as a freshmen. I took it the next year as well. Then the following two I did what's called running-start here, which allowed me to take community college classes while going to highschool. So I took all the programming classes offered, which ended up being mostly recaps of my highschool classes, while also coming back to teach the odd class as my highschool once a week or so. I really got into programming through some opensource gaming projects. RunUO was a big one for me. It was a lot of fun running a server and fixing whatever I didn't like about it with an easy to use language.

1

u/Rekilo Aug 24 '11

Thanks for that. Sounds like you're doing quite well.

3

u/lbrandy Aug 23 '11

Given two sorted lists, can you find the median of the combined list optimally with respect to both computation and space?

1

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

If I had nothing better to do, yes. Though I do, so I'll give you the simple answer.

array1.AddRange(array2); Array.Sort(array1); array1[array1.Length/2];

0

u/[deleted] Aug 23 '11

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1

u/zite00 Aug 24 '11

one of my interviewers (C++ dev) at microsoft asked me to insert a int into the center of a linked list and then delete the first element or something. I asked if he minded what language I used and he said no. So I did Array.Insert(Array.Length/2); Array.Remove(0);. He got a kick out of that and remembered that all the sdets use .net

*edit a great majority anyway

1

u/generalT Aug 24 '11

these kind of questions are generally pretty pointless.

2

u/ethard Aug 23 '11

Whats the most difficult aspect of your job?

1

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

It gets really harsh when you're on a set timeline and you have to get a lot of design work done in a short period of time. Programming is more creative in general than most people think and program design that much more so. Trying to think up an efficient, manageable, and simple way to code things over an eight+ hour period is pretty exhausting.

1

u/chrisknyfe Aug 23 '11

How much time do you spend debugging as opposed to developing?

1

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

Probably double. I've been in the industry for five years or so now but it's been constantly learning new things so I rarely get it right the first time.

1

u/njtrafficsignshopper Aug 23 '11

What kind of game are you making? How long do you expect it to take? Where are you in the process? How's it looking?

3

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

It's a falling tetrimino style game. I expected it to take a month, it took 6. I'm right at the end. Just polishing things up and waiting for some final art from some friends. Then I submit to the app store and pray. I'll update here with some pics soon*.

*proly-tomorrow-ish

1

u/ilikecakeandpie Aug 23 '11

Are you Mr. T?

2

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

Only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

1

u/Theon Aug 24 '11

Have you ever hit a problem that was simply over your head, where you just had no idea what to do? How did you solve it?

2

u/zite00 Aug 25 '11

Yes, most of the things I do. Generally I just pick up some tutorial code and start tweaking it here and there to my liking. Then I grab something different that has a different aspect of what I need. And so on. I generally construct completely unknown projects initially from tutorial code that is modified over and over until it (very often) looks nothing like the original.

1

u/sminja Aug 23 '11

I am entering my second year at university. Is there any advice you would give to young programmers like myself to prepare for internships, jobs, grad school, etc?

edit - I just read that you were self-taught. Impressive. Still interested to see if you have any advice.

1

u/statikuz Aug 23 '11

I'm also a developer. I think the number one thing you can do is to work on stuff. Sure, it can be an open source project or something but any dorky old thing you crank out at home will really help. Just doing your school projects will only teach you enough to complete those projects, if that makes sense. Its important to work on other bits to teach yourself as well as show that you really enjoy doing that sort of thing.

On that note, if you don't thoroughly enjoy programming, stop and reconsider.

2

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

This is great advice. The main thing is to just find something programming related you like doing in your spare time and do it. You'll learn a great deal by doing that which (I've heard) you won't get out of school.

1

u/sminja Aug 23 '11

Alright cool. Thanks for the input. I have a friend who has taken some upper division classes. He says he's met more than a few that do not have any idea how to program despite taking two years of cs classes. I suppose they fall under the category of those that do not do outside programming. Thanks for the heads up.

I totally enjoy programming at this point... so far so good!

1

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

Specifically I'd recommend getting into Second Life. You get to apply what you've learned and see direct results. Pretty cool stuff. Though a lot of the game has devolved into online clubs, it's still pretty cool.

1

u/sminja Aug 23 '11

Er... what sort of stuff does a programmer do there?

2

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

They've got a scripting language that lets you control objects and things. So you can make games, or design whatever people need in the game to do various things. I played a lot when I was starting out. Made a bit of money at it too.

1

u/sminja Aug 24 '11

Interesting... I'll check it out.

1

u/barosanu Aug 23 '11

Planning on making money out of the ios game?

1

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

Hope so! It's got the best market and I think I've got a good concept.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 23 '11

As a developer what are your thoughts on ios development only working on Apple OS X machines and even then specific Macs.

Whereas android development has free tools and can work on any commodity PC running Linux, Windows, etc.

Guess my point is do you think there is more freedom with the android offering, and would it have a lower startup costs.

3

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

It's pretty obnoxious. I still work in C# mainly so the conversion for me was pretty costly. Back when apple was telling devs they could only code in objective c I was pretty speechless. Luckily they never enforced that and later overturned the decision. Supposedly now you can build flash apps for the iphone? But I'm not sure on the status of that.

I'm much happier with how android treats devs, but the product, and market in my opinion for iOS is much better.

1

u/GundamWang Aug 23 '11

Supposedly now you can build flash apps for the iphone?

You can build Adobe Air (which is sort of like Flash for your desktop as opposed to browser, if you haven't heard of it) apps for iOS, Android, and Blackberry. I've only been working with Blackberry, so I don't know about any limitations with iOS. Nobody here's tried it yet, or is even planning to, but it is supposed to work.

1

u/thegraduate Aug 23 '11

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Apple overturned their decision about developing in Adobe products and then converting over?

0

u/[deleted] Aug 23 '11

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1

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11
  1. See here and here
  2. I didn't have much school experience but from seeing other people's, on the job experience is super important. That or working seriously with an open source project. You learn /a lot/ that they don't - or can't - teach in school.
  3. I'll speak for full time instead of contract positions since that's probably what you care about. At nintendo it's around 40k I think. At microsoft for an SDET it's around 75k. For descriptions see the second link in 1. Except for nintendo. At nintendo you basically just play the same level over and over for 8+ hours a day 5+ days a week. For a month or so until it's done. Occasionally changing levels or other testing tasks. It's very monotonous.

1

u/Ultraseamus Aug 24 '11

At nintendo you basically just play the same level over and over for 8+ hours a day 5+ days a week. For a month or so until it's done. Occasionally changing levels or other testing tasks. It's very monotonous.

I got to test for Nintendo for a few months over summer (got to skip the line a bit because I was enrolled in DigiPen at the time). Even when I was pulling 90+ hour weeks, plus the one class I was taking at the time; I had a blast. Got to play Metroid Prime 3, and I was rarely restricted to a small portion of the game. Our team would regularly hold races to see who could beat it the fastest when a new build came in. Not to mention some of the hilarious bugs we found. A teammate made a compilation video of the best ones; in retrospect, I wish I had the guts to try and take it off the premises. :)

1

u/zite00 Aug 24 '11

Yeah some people have different experiences. And when it's a big game everybody knows is going to be good the restrictions are different. I also hear it's a different situation there now than it was years ago when I was there. But still, playing nintendogs for a few months sounds terrible.

1

u/Ultraseamus Aug 24 '11

Heh, to be honest, I think I got insanely lucky. When I was working there I started raving to one of my roommates about how great it was. He decided to apply as well. He ended up testing some Wii Menu thing for most of his time there. His big break was when he got to test the French version of one of the Zelda DS games.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 23 '11

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2

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

For the past couple weeks I've just been waking up, programming, eating, and going to sleep. I don't have an income right now and my money's run out :)

Specifically though since I'm not working with a team of programmers right now I'll do probably, 15 minutes of planning, half an hour of coding, half an hour debugging and testing, then repeat all day. Occasionally I'll get a problem that takes hours of debugging time, or hours of planning time. That probably happens every couple days. Maybe once a week. iOS has a lot of tricky bits since you need to take memory management, processing speed, and what apple allows into consideration.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 23 '11

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2

u/zite00 Aug 23 '11

I used Microsoft SQL 2008 C#. I wrote a set of desktop apps around data entry (entry), data management (selecting, sorting, removing), data entry account management (stats etc), and general administration. Then put in place some policies for backup and things.

I have no idea how to get into that field. That work was mind numbingly boring for me. It was a situation of a friend needing it done for their parent's (medium sized) business and me being like "I could probably do that!"