All the best advice we could find on how to get a job • Hacker News Board

Re: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

#131

Post by p4wnc6 » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

mercutio2 wrote: post #127

p4wnc6 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an undergrad degree in math, a master's in applied math (focusing on MCMC statistical stuff), and a master's degree in electrical engineering (focusing on computer vision), and I did not know this, and it would have taken me more time than was allotted in the interview to derive it for myself. I feel that when I was asked and I said, "I don't know" it was the unequivocally right thing for me to say to capture…

I really feel for your personal situation, and I appreciate your candor here. Unfortunately, I come from the school of thought often derided hereabouts that this is an excellent interview question, and your unwillingness to engage with the question would've gotten you a bad score for that interview. Generally speaking I think it's great to start with: A) I don't know a great solution to that! Would you like me to bru…

I did A) and gave the for-loop algorithm that examines each integer in the range on one axis, computes the value of the line at that point, and checks if it's also an integer.

The interviewer said this works, asked me the time complexity (trivially O(N), where N is the number of integers in the range on that axis), and seemed happy.

Then he asked if I knew a way to do it using the GCD. I said I did not know off the top of my head, and then he concluded the interview and left no time for me to ask questions.

I think your characterization that I "didn't engage" is not right. The interviewer was also clearly not looking for someone who needed paper and pencil to work out this property, but instead specifically for someone who "just knew" it as an immediate trivia fact.

FWIW, I don't agree this is a good question. It's so-so, and it's fine if the goal is to work through it, but that was not at all the case.

I should also add that I consider myself reasonably good at dumb-shit tricky interview questions. I've done well in stereotypical finance interviews asking riddles, card shuffling tricks, colored balls in urns, drunk man sitting in the wrong airplane seat, etc., as well as more formal probability questions. This simply just came down to me not making an instantaneous connection between the number of integer lattice steps between the end points and the GCD of the ranges. I don't think it's the same as freezing, it's just that that knowledge would never have been accessed in the particular interview setting. It's just not how I think about that problem, and never would have been.

I'm certain you could devise endless algorithm trivia just the same. Print a binary tree in some weird order, rotate a 3D data array, etc. The one and only way I'd ever solve anything at all like that is slowly and by drawing lots of pictures, making some candidate code, putting it into an interactive programming environment with small toy examples, and iterating.

And in all my professional experiences, including a high-intensity quant finance job, that has been more than good enough for any job-related problem, and has also been what everyone else did. Only in interviews have I ever encountered anything like this.

Re: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

#132

Post by gerbilly » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 3:43 PM UTC

oppositelock wrote: post #22

merpnderp wrote: post #15

One thing in this article that really caught my eye was "Do free work". When I was a young kid I remember my grandfather, who was about to retire from a long career at the power utility having been head of the union, and much beloved by all his coworkers and managers, told me about how he got that job. He had been laid off at a grain mill, and was getting by as a butcher. But a friend of his got him in the door to se…

It's illegal to work for free today, unless you're a Congressional intern, since they exempted themselves from the law. Lots of "my grandfather..." stories are illegal in today's US, land of freedom and such.

>It's illegal to work for free today

Tell that to all the unpaid interns out there.

The fashion and journalism industries are rife with them.

Re: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

#133

Post by NateDad » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:00 PM UTC

lj3 wrote: post #89

graham1776 wrote: post #69

The one thing I always tell anyone on the job hunt, which few ever seem to take me up on: Informational Interviews. These are informal "can I take you out to coffee?" talks with people in your industry to see what they are working on, what is happening with them, what is going on in the industry. Every job I have ever gotten is through informal meetings with people I have met through my network (whether its the curre…

Any advice for doing this when you're in the middle of nowhere? I've heard of patio11 doing something similar via skype, but it just seems odd to invite people for coffee via skype or hangouts.

Work on open source. Be active on message boards and other social places online where your target community spends a lot of time (twitter, etc). Write blog posts about things you've done and share them in those communities. It's not super fast, but it casts a wide net. And then even if people don't know you, they know about you. Eventually a lot of people will be like "hey, it's lj3, who always responds with intelligent and well-thought out answers... oh, and didn't lj3 write that cool proof of concept for x thing?"

And then you look for people you've interacted with in the community, see where they work, and talk to those people about whether or not their company is hiring. Always ask, even if their careers page doesn't have anything. You never know when a new headcount may have opened up, and just hasn't made it to the careers page yet.

Good luck!

Re: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

#134

Post by Theodores » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

For me it comes down to this. Step 1 invest in some skills. That also means skills demanded by the world. In my instance PHP based stuff is fine even if not fashionable. People actually use PHP and there is enough there for me. I have had other skills to get work with in the past but for now I only care about a few code keywords for codebases I use.

As well as a skill in demand I like to have a second string to my bow, this being another work thing. This can be an appreciation of retail sales through working in a shop, this may be useful to a client in retail that has bricks and mortar stores. Having worked in science can also be that second string of related experience.

Then there is the matter of being able to show confidence and enthusiasm in all communication. As per the mocking quote at the top, confidence and showing that does matter. As does enthusiasm.

Also, aptitude is important. You have to actually believe the job is as good as yours and to be convinced of that fact. That has to be as certain as your mum doing Christmas Dinner, not to be questioned or thought negatively about.

I very much believe that self belief is really important and that it should come if you do have in demand skills and acceptable recent experience. Exams etc. matter not in an in demand sector.

Re: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

#135

Post by lazyant » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

> it’s better to have 2 impressive achievements than 2 impressive achievements and 3 weak ones.

This is logically false but psychologically true.

Re: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

#136

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 6:22 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #130

LionessLover wrote: post #119

It's amazing, this site is more and more like reddit or Slashdot. This comment is heavily downvoted? It's punishing people for not being outgoing. More and more silly and baseless "I don't like this" downvotes n this forum. Actually, the number of people who are comfortable to follow this advice is likely far lower than the opposite. Also, it depends on your history: As an introvert you don't have a useful network to…

But it's not "punishing" people for not being outgoing. This is actually actionable advise: if you network isn't hot, start lower, and warm it up first. It's hard, yes, and if you're really socially awkward, it will take some training to get used to. Nobody says you'll have to enjoy it, but sometimes the path to success have some unenjoyable steps along the way.

[deleted]

Re: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

#137

Post by dang » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 6:24 PM UTC

LionessLover wrote: post #119

It's amazing, this site is more and more like reddit or Slashdot. This comment is heavily downvoted? It's punishing people for not being outgoing. More and more silly and baseless "I don't like this" downvotes n this forum. Actually, the number of people who are comfortable to follow this advice is likely far lower than the opposite. Also, it depends on your history: As an introvert you don't have a useful network to…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11868228 and marked it off-topic.

Re: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

#138

Post by LionessLover » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 6:27 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #130

LionessLover wrote: post #119

It's amazing, this site is more and more like reddit or Slashdot. This comment is heavily downvoted? It's punishing people for not being outgoing. More and more silly and baseless "I don't like this" downvotes n this forum. Actually, the number of people who are comfortable to follow this advice is likely far lower than the opposite. Also, it depends on your history: As an introvert you don't have a useful network to…

But it's not "punishing" people for not being outgoing. This is actually actionable advise: if you network isn't hot, start lower, and warm it up first. It's hard, yes, and if you're really socially awkward, it will take some training to get used to. Nobody says you'll have to enjoy it, but sometimes the path to success have some unenjoyable steps along the way.

It is "actionable" exactly like the rich guy's advice to "just make money" is actionable. Outgoing personalities have no trouble with it, but you can scream at introverts all you want and end up claiming "it's all their own fault, I told them what to do, if they don't listen it's their own problem".

Re: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

#139

Post by taurath » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 8:00 PM UTC

p4wnc6 wrote: post #101

taurath wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After pouring through your comments throughout this thread I'm kinda left with the following conclusion (take it for what its worth, a random person on the internet): you have a mindset problem, and you're generalizing to the point that you wouldn't be able to accept nearly any job, or be happy in one. You've determined: Most companies are bad/wrong/awful/burnout machines All recruiters are either spambots or leeches…

I understand where you're coming from, but I also feel there's a serious argument to be made, Moral Mazes / Peopleware style, that most companies are bad/wrong/awful/burnout machines. The fact that open-plan offices are widely used is a perfect example. It's a condition fundamentally at odds with the productivity it is alleged to facilitate. Cost has long been disproven as a favorable factor for choosing open-plan, a…

You're getting all your news and concepts about how to work from one perspective - your reply confirms to me that your assumptions are killing you. Many many companies allow remote work. I have an open office which I dislike, but I can also work at home 2-3 days a week.

It's true, people don't trust companies like they did in the 50s, for good reason. Many many people though have families and work is not the highest priority in their lives. There are entire industries full of people that respect each other and just work 9-5.

You are being taken in by the anecdotes and horror stories and ignoring the vast majority of people who are paid well, go home to their families on time, rarely have to do overtime, and aren't terribly worried about a layoff but could find another job easily. People in many companies are treated with professional and personal respect. It's not that hard to find one even. But you need to believe they exist or your mindset will just be one of trying to find all these triggers and land mines you've set our before yourself.

I have no college degree or any eminent qualifications, and am not the best coder around. But I have had no problem getting hired into good companies that respect me and I think its because I don't allow myself to get jaded after many setbacks.

Re: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

#140

Post by p4wnc6 » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #139

p4wnc6 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand where you're coming from, but I also feel there's a serious argument to be made, Moral Mazes / Peopleware style, that most companies are bad/wrong/awful/burnout machines. The fact that open-plan offices are widely used is a perfect example. It's a condition fundamentally at odds with the productivity it is alleged to facilitate. Cost has long been disproven as a favorable factor for choosing open-plan, a…

You're getting all your news and concepts about how to work from one perspective - your reply confirms to me that your assumptions are killing you. Many many companies allow remote work. I have an open office which I dislike, but I can also work at home 2-3 days a week. It's true, people don't trust companies like they did in the 50s, for good reason. Many many people though have families and work is not the highest…

I appreciate your reply, but I also feel you are too nonchalantly dismissing something like e.g. Moral Mazes, which is a significant longitudinal study of bureaucracy and management hierarchy, using tools from academic sociology. It's not just some fly-by-night opinion.

In my experience, it is extremely hard to find jobs that provide a combination of paying well, allowing you a personal life, and having reasonable enough hours to avoid excessive fatigue or burnout. I've interviewed with places top to bottom and had four post-graduate jobs, all of which failed in at least two of those categories while having appeared like they would succeed in all of them when I did interviews. All of my friends and colleagues report similar anecdotes, as do many, many commenters here. The anecdotes describing jobs in which you feel you are well paid, have a feasible work/life balance, and freedom to pursue a personal life, are unequivocally in the minority. That's not "my perspective" ... that's just collecting data in the wild.

And though I think I've had it bad, my experiences have been like a dream vacation or something compared to what my mother has lived through in her job as a court reporter in a small town courthouse. Rampant sexism, ageism, uncompensated overtime which is not allowed for her position, bosses (judges) who demean her, yell at her, do illegal things like carry out their private landlord affairs in their judges chambers during work hours and force her to handle the paperwork for it.

Or my brother, a factory worker in the area whose work stories almost cause me to have an aneurysm out of frustration. More uncompensated overtime, overtly insulting and demeaning bosses, sales staff who make jokes about all the catered meetings they get and how they will leave the day-old food out on the factory floor because the floor workers are so desperate for a free meal that they'll eat anything. He earns just barely over the poverty line, has no vacation, commutes around 40 miles each way plus traffic, and every single other job in the region that he could possibly get is no better. All so he can just barely service college loan debt that has been utterly useless for getting employment.

The problem of finding employment that can sustain human cognitive health is massive and hearing you utterly dismiss it like this makes me feel like you reside in an incredible bubble where you've been shielded from what it's really like, and that while I appreciate your advice, it is just not applicable.