321–330 of 735 posts
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> an overconfident 25-year-old that just downed three lunch beers with a wet burrito at the Mexican place down the street from the office on a rainy Wednesday That's...oddly specific.
I'm only 33 and I've worked with at least two of 'em. They're a type :-D
Name of the game now is not to get fired at all costs and weather the storm until the dust settles...
hiring market tightened up... that doesn't mean there isn't one
- Much less resposnes
- For your sanity you want to make sure there aren't obvious signs of something being a ghost job, an H1B hire, an internal hire, or a farce because "we're always growing" (lying).
- expect longer processes. Hasn't happened to me but 7+ stage interview processes is not uncommon these days, even outside of tech
- accept that some processes will be frozen under your nose. especially because of longer processes crossing quarters
- expect less respect in the process. They feel like they do not want you. You are expendable
- don't bother negotiating in this market. You get a number and take it unless you already have a job. Even then they may simply pass you for someone more desperate. BTW wages are being suppressed; you're probably not getting pre 2023 salaries right now.
Yeah... if you're not being abused at work, I'd just weather it out.
I recently completed a take-home assignment with the following instructions: This project is designed to evaluate your ability to: - Deconstruct complex problems into actionable steps. - Quickly explore and adopt new frameworks. - Implement a small but impactful proof of concept (PoC). - Demonstrate coding craftsmanship through clean, well-architected code. We estimate this project will take approximately 5–7 hours.…
If your interview process is susceptible to AI then you don't need to hire for the job. Just use an AI and prompt it. The job you are therefore hiring for is now trivial. If it weren't, no amount of AI could pass your interview process.
I belive this line of thinking mistakes the result with the process, similar to assuming that the reason companies ask people to reverse a linked list is because there's an unmet market demand for list-reversal algorithms. An interview has to be hard enough to filter those that are unqualified but also easy enough that the right person can pass with some minor preparation. If an interviewer asked me for the equivalen…
Yeah, ideally. Meanwhile the market evolved to asking Leetcode hards on the spot.
As usual, companies take a good concept and milk it to the point where you need to cheat or make studying leetcode your full time job to ace it. I'm not to sympathetic.
(PS yes, I've been asked to do what was essentially spec work a few times. Woudl have been smarter to reply with an invoice, but I was too tired and just said no).
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Earlier this past week I asked Copilot to generate some Golang tests and it used some obscure assertion library that had a few hundred stars on GitHub. I had to explicitly ask it to generate idiomatic tests and even then it still didn't test all of the parameters that it should have. At a previous job I made the mistake of letting it write some repository methods that leveraged SQLAlchemy. Even though I (along with m…
I feel like I am taking crazy pills that other devs don't feel this way. How bad are the coders that they think these AI's are giving them super powers. The PR's with AI code are so obvious and when you ask the devs why, they don't even know. They just say, well the AI picked this, as if that means something in and of itself.
I was amazed at how great ChatGPT and DeepSeek and Claude etc are at quickly throwing together some small visualisations in Python or JavaScript. But they struggled a lot with Bird-style literate Haskell. (And just that specific style. Plain Haskell code was much less of a problem.)
Run competitions. If you're hiring fresh grads, this is probably the best way to filter by skill. If you can use AI to beat all the other candidates that's a skill by itself. In practice, those that use AI rarely ever make it into the top 10. Add a presentation/demo as part of the criteria to filter out those with bad communication skills.
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I feel like I am taking crazy pills that other devs don't feel this way. How bad are the coders that they think these AI's are giving them super powers. The PR's with AI code are so obvious and when you ask the devs why, they don't even know. They just say, well the AI picked this, as if that means something in and of itself.
Because there are plenty of devs who take the output, actually read if it makes sense, do a code review, iterate back and forth with it a few times, and then finally check in the result. It's just a tool. Shitty devs will make shitty code regardless of the tool. And good devs are insanely productive with good tools. In your example what's the difference with that dev just copy/pasting from StackOverflow?
To go off on a tangent: yes, good developers can produce good code faster. And bad developers can produce bad code faster (and perhaps slightly better than before, because the models are mostly a bit smarter than copy-and-paste is).
Everyone potentially benefits, but it won't suddenly turn all bad programmers into great programmers.
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I'm only 33 and I've worked with at least two of 'em. They're a type :-D
You were one of them... 8 years ago?
The LLMs are much more eager to please and to write lots of code. When I was younger, I would get distracted and play computer games (or comment on HN..), rather than churn out mountains of mediocre code all the time.
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most experienced developers don't have a portfolio because they code for a living lol
I don't really think this is true? This might be true for developers that only work for companies and never in their own time maybe. My portfolio site is just one of the sites on my personal website that also hosts many of my projects. It wasn't much work to setup, and it provides organization and sharing capability so there's motivation to make it anyways.
I'd argue that that is indeed the majority. Maybe they have some work from school days, but very few devs are making portfolio pieces years into the industry once they can flesh out their "Employment" sectiion.
IME you only need a portfolio as a non-junior if you are making a lateral move.
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It's pretty obvious when someone's input focus changes to nothing or when their mouse leaves the screen entirely, or you could just ask to see the display settings to begin. Doesn't solve for multiple computers but it's pretty obvious in real time when someone's actual attention drifts or they suddenly have abilities they didn't have before. Either way, screen sharing beats whiteboards. Even if we throw our hands up…
There is nothing fraudulent about using LLMs. If people can use them on the job, it's okay to use them on the interview. They're the calculators of tomorrow if not of today. Interviewing just needs to adapt such as by assessing one's open source projects and contributions. Not much more is needed. And if the candidate completely misrepresents their open source profile, this can be handled by an initial contract-to-hi…
Open source contributions is a bad metric for interviewing too. People have lives outside a computer, if they aren’t doing open source contributions in their free time outside of work I wouldn’t hold that against them. If someone has those that’s great and I’d take a look, but I’m not disqualifying someone else for not working for free. Someone doing OSS as an interviewing badge of honor is a chump in my book. At least do it for principled reasons.