561–570 of 579 posts
I think openings and interviews are very slow right now due to the holidays
- Recruiters being very open about the salary range. This is a change from even a few years back, where there would be endless back and forth of "who calls the number" first. Now out of maybe 30 early conversations only 1 recruiter absolutely refused to state the range. The top end is extremely consistent, the bottom end (as typical for Canada) can be laughably low.
- US companies and remote work coming in in a big way. Some of them position themselves at the high end of the local market (which I define to be around C$200k base for non-MANGA companies). Others decide to offer the US range (US$180-200k), which is of course better but in some cases has the drawback of being a contractor.
- Demand in my field (DevOps/SRE/cloud infra) hasn't changed much. Still multiple pings a week from recruiters, down from multiple a day. Not a problem getting interviews, at all. Had multiple offers already but looking for a better fit.
- Few attempts at take-home exercises. I generally refuse these outright unless they are paid; some companies react to that by simply waiving the take-home.
Some things that did change...
- the remarkable extent to which US salaries are outliers worldwide is beginning to have an effect. Every single company I worked at for the last decade had non-NA dev teams, usually at the periphery (support, integrations, follow-the-sun ops). Now core teams are distributed and dev work is shifting away from high-cost centers. One example I saw is in Gergely's "which companies are still hiring" spreadsheet -- how many of these companies are not looking in US at all, or are Europe-/Asia-centric?
- startup non-base comp is becoming a really bad deal, even for Series A. I was offered some shares, even with the founder's own rosy projections an exit for me would be a nice bonus at most. Why deal with the stress if there's no meaningful payback at the end?
- some smaller companies asking LC Hards all of a sudden. To me that just feels like someone out of Google founding a startup and having no idea how to hire non-developers.
- people having less filter in general. One of the best things I really started doing in my interviews is shutting up and listening instead of working to sell myself / ask questions. People will admit amazing things about the company or about the level of fit / misfit for a role when they try to fill in the silence.
- as a corollary, how do interviewers behave if they sense it's likely not a fit? Do they start trash talking your experience / chances of success / achievable salary, or just let it go? I've had a recruiter try to convince me there aren't offers at 175 base + in Canada. I've had a founder tell me no one will offer me a manager role (after a 30 minute interview wherein they talked most of the time and barely asked me anything). Just take a bit of time to listen and the trash will sort itself out.
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So your suggestion is to just become a content developer and start marketing yourself online? Getting your work in front of others and getting the amount of reach that you have is also a lot of luck. Not everyone can get the same amount of reach as you have - I've seen hundreds of developers shouting out into the void without any recognition.
> Getting your work in front of others and getting the amount of reach that you have is also a lot of luck I think this is dismissive of their talent, relative to other people who might try doing the same. To be fair, swyx was also being dismissive of their talent "Just work publicly and you don't have to prove your coding skills!", which of course assumes your talent will be evident to anyone glancing at your public…
I believe those who are popular content creators are also better at marketing and sales. Getting their work recognized means that their marketing talent is good and not necessarily their programming skill relative to other people who are doing the same.
When looking from that perspective - are you optimizing for hiring people with good programming skills or those with good marketing skill?
Interviewed with about 28 companies for almost 3 months, without a single offer! I was starting to get really worried about money and burned out from interviewing. In the past I've never interviewed with more than 2 or 3 before getting an offer I now this is incredibly privileged. I'm not humble-bragging, just observing the change in the market. As things usually turn out, during the last week of the 3-month search I…
I had the exact same experience about 5 months ago. > 40 applications, ~30 responses from recruiter, did at least 1 phone screen at 20 of them and around 10 full interviews (4-6 modules each). It was brutal and I don't recommend it. Almost 20 years of experience at great large & small companies in the SF Bay Area. I like to think that I'm relatively intelligent and competent, but man, some of the interviews were tort…
This has eliminated 90% of the stress involved in job searching, and I'm confident that I can get an offer at basically every interview I get into.
I'm not going to get a position at Amazon or a SF company, but after seeing what friends have gone through I have no interest anyway. I also make coastal money living in the Midwest, which was achieved by the exact method I outlined above.
Now if I was in a desperate situation I would probably be forced to go through with these whiteboard interviews, which would suck - you do what you have to do though. However, I wish more engineers would refuse whiteboard interviews. If more job seekers did this I feel like we could change the industry, but the whiteboard philosophy is so widespread that it's an uphill battle.
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I went out of my way to not do leetcode so I only had one because Glassdoor was wrong. I would ask the recruiter during the initial call where I also talked about salary so as yo not waste everyone's time. I cancelled a few interviews that I later found out were leet code, not because I don't want to do them but more I think the people you end up working with are better at testing than coding, from my experience.
Was the comp comparable to FAANG and other public companies in the end or did you take a paycut?
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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 N That'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.
You had to compute a graph from a set of points (i think it was knn, not sure) and do stuff on it. At some point of the defense, this happened
Me: I skipped this question.
Examinator: why?
Me: If I compute it using the graph structure, it reduces to max-clique, which is np-complete. I looked for a solution using the point dara but didn't find it
Examinator: can you write an algorithm for max-clique on the board?
Me: here. This is exponential time
Examinator: it's worst case exponential time. But in this case it would have worked, you just had to try it
Me: urgh
Now I've learned my lesson: np-complete doesn't mean impossible
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> And almost everyone is hiring by committee now. Because if the committee hires the wrong person, nobody hires the wrong person. At least in some cases, it's a reaction to some managers having made hiring decisions perceived by leadership as mistakes. Impersonal and bureaucratic as it might be, to the extent it keeps the bar higher I think it's a good thing.
I understand that reasoning, but I don’t think it bears out. It results in frequently hiring the lowest common denominator. No risks are taken. Bold thinking is suppressed. It trains your managers, whom you don’t trust to hire their own team members, that leadership is done by committees. And what’s the solution to a bad committee hire? A bigger committee.
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That's quite a bit for an interview. How long did it take? Did they gave you code to plug a piece into? Or did you have to write the whole game?
It was a whole game from scratch in the programming language of my choice. They only specified the rules. It was keyboard and console only, btw, no graphics or controllers or sound. I took the whole hour and was mostly done when I ran out of time. I forgot to write the score keeping before the interviewer came back. The AI player was “extra credit” and I finished that, so it helped excuse my scoring oversight. It was…
I've never done anything spectacularly fancy with CLI terminals. I could rig up a UI with c++ and qt, or python and tkinter.. but it's been a while. Longer ago, I used to do objc but that was forever ago!
So yea, I'd die on this one hahaha.
I should try it sometime. I love tetris!
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That is just Amazon being Amazon. When they interviewed me the first time, the interviewer didn't show to work, so they asked another guy to interview me, he ended interviewing me in a language he didn't knew, to a position using another language entirely, the whole thing was a farce. Some years later Amazon recruiters contacted me, asked me to go interview in person. Then during the interview in their offices, they…
Over a video call, the interviewer asked a coding question and immediately put on headphones and I am sure was listening to music. There was no dialogue and I had to use visual cues to get his attention. I coded using C++ and pass by reference. He had never seen it in his life. He refused to believe modification on a reference would modify the value in the calling function! I hoping he would be willing to discuss or…
I once shadowed an interview once, where this happened. I felt bad for the candidate, because I wasn't allowed to speak whilst shadowing the interview, and neither did I have to submit feedback; and the candidate clearly was coding well. Although, I did reach out to the recruiter about this. And I don't know what happened after that.
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It was a whole game from scratch in the programming language of my choice. They only specified the rules. It was keyboard and console only, btw, no graphics or controllers or sound. I took the whole hour and was mostly done when I ran out of time. I forgot to write the score keeping before the interviewer came back. The AI player was “extra credit” and I finished that, so it helped excuse my scoring oversight. It was…
Yea that would do it for me haha. My bread and butter is embedded C! Technically it's C++ but we try to ease off the ridiculous C++isms because this stuff needs to be readable to the person that was waken up with a phone call at 3am and needs to explain some random behavior lol. I've never done anything spectacularly fancy with CLI terminals. I could rig up a UI with c++ and qt, or python and tkinter.. but it's been…
Re: ridiculous C++isms and embedded C, I’ve been in the same spot for my entire career. After learning C++ in college, I joined a CG film company that had banned C++ (dumb story) so I learned how to write object oriented C. Working in console games after that, we weren’t allowed to use any built-in memory management or exceptions or a current compiler, so very restricted C++. (And the worst bug I ever fixed was when someone tried to get clever with their C++ copy constructor.) These days I use CUDA, which is also technically C++ but basically C.