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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?

#421

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #376
ryandrake wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need your professor to coach interview candidates. On the "interviewer" side of the table, I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question that should produce a quick, simple answer, and instead got a 5-10 minute stream-of-consciousness word salad out of the candidate. Or a huge run-on sentence this-and-that-and-this-and-also-that-oh-and-this... without coming up for air. It's so common, I must assume t…

I suspect many interviewers reward using a question as an opportunity to showcase knowledge though, even if it means rewarding that kind of expansive verbosity. I suspect the this and also that you allude to is the candidate not wanting to be called out for failing to mention a corner case or tradeoff. Of course, conversations are rarely legalistically constrained to answering only the precise letter of a question as…

> if the Workplace StackExchange is anything to go by, one interviewer's flying colours are often another interviewer's red flags.

This is absolutely true.

In /r/RecruitingHell, I recently saw a job seeker saying a hiring manager dropped them after they tried to connect on LinkedIn during the interview loop. Meanwhile, another HM in another loop praised them for it.

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

#422

Post by icedchai »

Kranar wrote: post #412
icedchai wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are actually both wrong. If they passed objects by value you'd be modifying a copy. They technically "pass by object reference" as another poster mentioned.

No sorry, you are incorrect and you can verify the correct answer on Wikipedia or any technical book on this subject. For example the Java Language Specification states in section 8.4.1 that Java is pass by value: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se8/html/jls-8.html... ECMAScript's Language Specification also states in section 10.6 that it uses pass by value semantics, although it's much more formal about the…

I said they pass objects by reference, which is true. Technically, yes, Java is pass by value. However, objects are not passed by value. The value you are passing is a reference (pointer) to that object. If this were not the case, you would not be able to see modifications to method parameters reflected in the caller because you're modifying a copy. You are not modifying a copy.

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

#423

Post by rockemsockem »

oneplane wrote: post #393
throwaway5231 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false and ageist. I got a computer engineering degree at a non elite state school very recently and this was covered in the first c++ and c classes. For that matter c# has an “out” variable that mimics this functionality, and the intro Java class covered primitive types vs. reference types. While reference types in Java aren’t the exact same thing, they do allow a void function to modify the state of the call…

I doubt that you can make an absolute "this is false and ageist" statement in any context, but here on HN, I would have at least expected you to supply information on what location in the world and level of institutional schooling you have. Here in north-west EU C and C++ haven't been a part of the core curriculum for over 25 years (unless you do embedded work), and code with side-effects in desktop-class systems has…

My 2014 undergraduate degree from an engineering school on the east coast included two required tracks, one for data structures/algorithms taught in Java and a computer systemsey track that taught C, Linux, and some operating system essentials.

I think an operating systems course, or something approaching it, is a pretty standard piece of good CS curriculums in the US still from talking with other folks I've worked with. And I live/work very far from where I got my degree.

EDIT: in the US, not in the CS, lol

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

#424

Post by dnissley »

llanowarelves wrote: post #395
somenameforme wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One practical problem is that there are a fair amount of people who are simply unstable, and if told why they were rejected (in very neutral to positive framing) they will actively challenge it and even go pseudo-stalker mode over it. Dealing with just a handful of these guys is enough to do away with providing any sort of feedback. Like many things, a few bad apples ruin nice things for everybody.

Then we have a right (and moral right) to ghost companies without any notice, too.

Yes, in the US you do. Makes you look bad just like it makes a company that does it look bad.

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

#425

Post by dllthomas »

kurtreed wrote: post #250
dmurray wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

You can offer. Nothing about it being NP should prevent your implementing an exact solution, though. It'll be slow as balls on (at least) some inputs, and you should surface that, but maybe they only need something that works for NThat's different than it being undecidable, in which case you have to insist on providing something other than an exact algorithm that handles every input.

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

#426

Post by Joeboy »

remh wrote: post #398
pizza234 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passing a reference is semantically different from passing by reference (the latter being a functionality of the language); doing the former (behind the scenes) doesn't imply that the language supports the latter (if one wants to be rigorous, not even C supports pass by reference). The canonical example is a function that swaps the variables passed to a function: a, b = 10, 20 swap_fn(&a, &b) a == 20 # true Since the…

In python it actually depends on the data type! Python 3.10.8 (main, Oct 13 2022, 09:48:40) [Clang 14.0.0 (clang-1400.0.29.102)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> def f(d): ... d['foo'] = 'bar' ... >>> a = {} >>> f(a) >>> a {'foo': 'bar'}

My understanding of what's going on with python is it passes by reference (hence what your code does), but if the data type is immutable any modification results in a new instance being created in the scope of the function, and the object passed in is not modified. Which mostly looks like pass-by-value behaviour.

I guess my understanding could be technically wrong in some way, but it seems to reflect what happens.

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

#427

Post by SpeedilyDamage »

nscalf wrote: post #281
SpeedilyDamage wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the plebs sign contracts saying they won’t. It’s not illegal, just highly unethical. It’s also not true, he does not know someone doing this.

Is it highly unethical? You're hired to do a job, if you can successfully do that job and another one, I don't think there is anything unethical about doing that. It's very common in lower wage positions, not sure why it's suddenly unethical in higher wage positions. I would say it's unethical to force people to sign a contract saying you own all of their attention during the day, even if you don't use it.

You sign a contract stating you're going to devote all of your available professional mental energy towards your company's problems.

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

#428

Post by rockemsockem »

remh wrote: post #398
pizza234 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passing a reference is semantically different from passing by reference (the latter being a functionality of the language); doing the former (behind the scenes) doesn't imply that the language supports the latter (if one wants to be rigorous, not even C supports pass by reference). The canonical example is a function that swaps the variables passed to a function: a, b = 10, 20 swap_fn(&a, &b) a == 20 # true Since the…

In python it actually depends on the data type! Python 3.10.8 (main, Oct 13 2022, 09:48:40) [Clang 14.0.0 (clang-1400.0.29.102)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> def f(d): ... d['foo'] = 'bar' ... >>> a = {} >>> f(a) >>> a {'foo': 'bar'}

That example actually holds with what the parent comment said. You aren't trying to modify d exactly, you're modifying d's contents.

  Python 3.8.10 (default, Jun 22 2022, 20:18:18) 
  [GCC 9.4.0] on linux
  Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more 
  information.
  >>> def f(d):
  ...     d = {'foo': 'bar'}
  ... 
  >>> a = {}
  >>> f(a)
  >>> a
  {}
does not modify the passed in dictionary, because the reference 'd' itself is passed by value. So the function doesn't change what d references for the caller. Java works the same way.

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

#429

Post by nvarsj »

icedchai wrote: post #310
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't teach pass by reference these days. Anyone you find in the real world under ~30 years old may not even be aware that you can pass a reference and modify it directly without having to make a method return a value. It's super cool to have someone explain to you side effects yet you show them a method with a null return and run it for them showing that the value has changed and they are mesmerized.

I don't believe this. Almost all mainstream languages use pass-by-reference by default. Java, python, javascript all pass objects by reference.

I'm definitely nitpicking here, but I'd say almost all languages use pass-by-value, and what you're talking about is copying a pointer. C++ actually has true pass by reference, nothing is copied in memory.

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

#430

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

ryandrake wrote: post #338
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. In fact, I had an instructor in college that would have marked you down if a quiz/test asked this question and you wrote an entire paragraph describing call-by-value versus call-by-reference. On the final, he said "Each of these questions is answerable in 1-3 sentences. If you're writing 1-3 paragraphs, you're wasting my time and I will subtract points even if your answer is correct."

We need your professor to coach interview candidates. On the "interviewer" side of the table, I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question that should produce a quick, simple answer, and instead got a 5-10 minute stream-of-consciousness word salad out of the candidate. Or a huge run-on sentence this-and-that-and-this-and-also-that-oh-and-this... without coming up for air. It's so common, I must assume t…

> On the "interviewer" side of the table, I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question that should produce a quick, simple answer, and instead got a 5-10 minute stream-of-consciousness word salad out of the candidate.

Yup.

There's a fine line between giving a thorough answer and just vomiting up everything you know that's slightly relevant to the original question.

I do AppSec. If I'm interviewing a candidate, and I ask them what Cross-site Scripting is, then if at some point during their answer they bring up SQL Injection, that's a red flag.

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