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Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

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Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#241

Post by CWuestefeld »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #212
ARandomerDude wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite as experienced as you (I’m in the 10-15 year bracket). I never ask LeetCode questions because it’s far easier on both sides to ask experience-based questions like “what do you like/dislike about ?” If I get superficial answers that tells me something. If i get well thought-out answers from people who have clearly spent time in the trenches that tells me something too.

I've been doing this for 30+ years, and I've found the same. It's not just whether the candidate can answer correctly, but how they answer. Back when I was doing C/C++ interviews, I'd ask questions like: What's the difference between single and double quotes? A meh candidate answers something about you need single quotes for just a single character. A good candidate answers about how the data type for a double-quoted…

I just realized that my above model answer gets broken by the formatter. the first question should get answered with char-star, that is, pointer to char.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#242

Post by nsxwolf »

nbaugh1 wrote: post #78
gorbachev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is not going to eat all the jobs. Can we stop this nonsense, please?

I'll get scared when someone shows me an actual deployed, running, and maintained app by something like chatGPT. Solving problems with code snippets is a tiny part of the job

I'll get scared when a chat bot can log into JIRA, take a ticket, read the requirements, say "Hmm, there's not enough details in here and a couple things seem ambiguous or contradictory..." Then it schedules a meeting with the biz dev and a QA resource and they all hash out and improve the ticket. Then it goes and implements the code and puts it out for review, addresses any comments, works with QA to clarify how to test it (maybe that's another chat bot) and deploys it.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#243

Post by jenscow »

samhuk wrote: post #67
gk1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your website doesn’t load.

Ah, sorry, I have edited my original comment. TL;DR it's a very little server sitting right behind me, and gets easily stressed.

For remedial points, claim it's on a raspberry pi. Slowness due to React but you're re-writing it in Rust.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#244

Post by trentnix »

akhmatova wrote: post #239
trentnix wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. In the case I mentioned, interviewers did more talking than asking and listening, interviews were far too easy (I’m glad you like me but if you can’t really discern whether I’m good at my job, you’ve probably hired other people who are bad at theirs), and bad answers to questions about their business model (when stock options were part of the compensation package). It just didn’t feel like a fit.

interviews were far too easy (I’m glad you like me but if you can’t really discern whether I’m good at my job, you’ve probably hired other people who are bad at theirs), Maybe they have ways of evaluating your potential without subjecting you to an endless barrage of gratuitously difficult (or simply tedious) questioning.

Maybe, and it’s flattering to think that. But I have to make my decisions based on the data I have.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#245

Post by zamalek »

single_identity wrote: post #117

It's quite bad atm. Senior C++ engineer specializing in system-level programming, worked across several challenging domains including database internals for the last several years. 10+ years of experience. Applied to around 25 jobs. Ghosted by 15 of them. Out of the 10 remaining, 3 of them are limited in terms of remote - to be considered you have to reside within certain countries. From the remaining 7 I only got th…

> Did not get an offer because I was not strong enough candidate

I was laid off last year and went to interview at an adjacent employer. They had a bunch of employees (not only engineers) hired from the company that was laying me off. One of which had previously walked out the door with a bunch of code to form their own startup; they were hired as a staff engineer. That employee frequently reached out to me for advice and guidance on writing the piece of code that they made off with.

I flunked their cargo-culting hiring process hard. I knew I should have walked out of the interview the minute they put fucking Leetcode in front of me, but didn't.

Moral of the story: your interview success has little to do with your experience and aptitude as an engineer. Here's a list of shops where you might find more success: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#246

Post by par »

throw_aws_inter wrote: post #16

I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then th…

Exact same thing happened to me with Amazon. Spent a considerable amount of time interviewing with them for a manager position, then they simply ghosted with zero recruiter response for weeks on end. Finally they told me they ended up closing the position.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#247

Post by nemo44x »

atraac wrote: post #210
nemo44x wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re being ripped off. I’m paying guys in various parts of Europe well more than this with probably less experience. European software developers are grossly underpaid across the board but 100k is very low. I’m paying around 120-130k in Amsterdam which has a similar CoL to Berlin.

I'm not looking for anything right now but just out of curiosity you'd care to share a name? Even privately?

Company I'm referring to would fit the profile of a small/mid-cap publicly traded company. Compensation in any company of this size or larger is based on industry information. In essence, companies share their compensation via surveys and can then subscribe to a database which lists ranges for certain levels and roles and regions.

Companies tend to have a ladder and different paths/comp levels for managers and individual contributors. Different regions are then sliced into different levels and what you're left with is location, a role, and a level. These are combined to create a salary band which is the range an employee that fits into the profile.

It's important to note, it's a salary band. This means an individual can have a fairly wide range of total compensation across this band. Also, some companies are biased towards salary or stock options/RSUs. But generally, an employee will have a lower "comp-ratio" meaning they are under the middle of the band. This leaves room for raises, etc. At some point an employee will be at the top of their band. They are either promoted into a higher level, kept at their current level but only given CoL increases (bands tend to increase ~3% each year), or fired.

The company can decide how competitive they want to be in each region or choose to not hire in a region because it is too expensive to be competitive there.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#248

Post by mylons »

adamcharnock wrote: post #15
a-bit-of-code wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that kind of seniority/experience, what fraction of companies asked LeetCodey stuff? Was it easy or medium/hard problems? How much time did you have to spend preparing/practicing?

Not the OP, but with similar experience levels and I’ve never done a LeetCode interview, and even regular interviews are pretty light. I mostly contract though, and they generally offer me full time after a little while if I want it.

big agree on contracting interviews being light. i’ve had about a dozen in the last year and only 2 asked technical questions. the rest were more curious about time lines and cost.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#249

Post by abfan1127 »

akhmatova wrote: post #229
dxxvi wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my own experience: if the recruiters don't call me back, that means I fail. Calling them just makes me more stressful/sad.

This is my own experience: if the recruiters don't call me back, that means I fail. No - it just means the decision has been made, and you won't be hired. Which is different from "you failed". It could just as easily be their failure to evaluate you properly.

I came here to say this. You didn't fail. Its just not a good fit. maybe they are incompetent, and saving you heartache in the long run. Maybe they weren't able to extract your relevant experience. maybe you didn't share effectively. Just keep moving and good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#250

Post by kurtreed »

dmurray wrote: post #226
kurtreed wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one Amazon interview the guy asked a coding challenge that he had apparently come up with himself. I realized later it was NP-complete.

Is that a bad thing? A lot of real world problems don't have simple computational complexity. I'd learn more about someone from how they considered heuristic tradeoffs and assumptions that could produce a "good enough" solution to a tough problem than seeing if they could reproduce Dijkstra's algorithm from memory.

It wasn't framed as "find an approximate/heuristic solution".
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