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What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

medium.freecodecamp.com

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Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#31

Post by virmundi »

walshemj wrote: post #23
dood wrote: post #6

Are people in America seriously getting offers of $120k with no degree, no experience, and not even a side-project? That is mind-blowing. In London, probably the biggest/richest market outside of USA, that sort of salary is beyond what most experienced developers get, even some very good ones. I must be missing something here (some sort of bubble?) because I can't see how businesses can be profitable paying those sor…

That's over £90k in our terms you can see why Google and othe reengineering companies set up in the UK as we are cheap

I have no familiarity with the UK tax practices, but what kind of burden are you for an employer? The US has 7.5% tax per employee. There are a few others such as health insurance.

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#32

Post by ericmcer »

Slackwise wrote: post #7

This whole hardcore quizzing and testing during interviews has to go. As far as I can see, all it does is create selection bias for people who memorize things or like to practice interview questions. Maybe that's just me being too old for that kinda' crap.

I am pretty young and it seems stupid to me too, this guy wanted to be a React Dev. If he was ever at work writing a binary search tree by hand, or writing his own quick sort function, then he would be wasting his time and creating a huge potential problem point in the code.

This guy claims to have worked ~6 days a week for 3 months not to become a great full stack dev, but to become a great interviewee. Seems kinda backwards to me.

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#33

Post by brianwawok »

ericmcer wrote: post #28

Is it still a huge deal to have an encyclopedic knowledge of data structures and algorithms? This guy was applying for jobs doing React/Node, which is what I do, and two years after school I cant remember all the details of the sorting algorithms. Would it be so bad to tell the interviewer that if I do anything other than call browser APIs to sort data I am failing at my job and wasting time?

You can go that way.

I find it very unlikely the person interviewing you would "see the errors in his ways" and go "ok you are right, dumb question".

It is a human flaw that when we interview, we project. If we are really good at X, we want to deep dive on that topic. Perhaps it is important for the job. Perhaps we are just trying to show off to a candidate. Who knows.

I know I am a fullstack guy, but light on React. If the interview before me was a webdev and asked you a bunch of React questions, I could not add anything of value there. So I would poke around algos and linux and testing and CD and all of the other things I know about, to see where you fall. Not really to show off how leet my algos knowledge is... but I personally would rather hire a guy who knows big O, all things else equal.

I do doubt most jobs are so specialized you only need 1-2 frameworks, and nothing else. Knowing what memory is isn't a terrible thing to understand for any programming job...

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#34

Post by gxs »

Great article.

The only part that I hesitated with was the part about getting through to real people.

After reading a post like this, not sure how hiring managers (or their team) are going to feel about getting inundated with emails from candidates. After all, that exact use case is why we have recruiting departments to begin with.

I would tweak it and say use your network to get in touch with real people. The effects of getting a million emails from candidates might be blunted a bit if they are coming from someone you actually know.

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#35

Post by dominotw »

Slackwise wrote: post #7

This whole hardcore quizzing and testing during interviews has to go. As far as I can see, all it does is create selection bias for people who memorize things or like to practice interview questions. Maybe that's just me being too old for that kinda' crap.

There is zero chance of this happening until google/facebook stop doing it.

This comment appears in every single interview/hiring thread for past decade. Only change I've seen is actually the opposite now there are 5-10 "rounds" of these quizzes even in a no name enterprise companies.

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#36

Post by throwawaysbdif »

goldenbeet wrote: post #9
AlexC04 wrote: post #2

well first thing - that code at the top can be simplified. function getDevJob(studying, hardwork, luck){ return study && hardwork && luck; } But more seriously - I actually really like point #2. I firmly believe that job interviews have a strong bias towards people with experience doing job interviews. Your "offer-ladder" seems to confirm that for me. It reminds me of that freakonomics article about how real estate a…

Also note that the "easier" interviews are from companies that are less competitive/less established. So their offers are going to be lower not because the candidate comes off as less qualified, but because they just don't have the money to pay their employees the 120K+ salaries. So that graphic is also misleading.

This hasn't been my experience in general. Most of my hard interviews were at startups. To sound old and jaded, I think a lot of it has to do with the startup mentality "we only hire the top 0.0001% of coders " . Once you've been in the business for years you realize the fallacy of that thinking and try to hire good coders with a focus on finding people fun to work with.

Most big companies I applied at had about half of the grilling and the rest of the interview was "culture fit"

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#37

Post by palakchokshi »

pinouchon wrote: post #14
AlexC04 wrote: post #2

well first thing - that code at the top can be simplified. function getDevJob(studying, hardwork, luck){ return study && hardwork && luck; } But more seriously - I actually really like point #2. I firmly believe that job interviews have a strong bias towards people with experience doing job interviews. Your "offer-ladder" seems to confirm that for me. It reminds me of that freakonomics article about how real estate a…

While we're at it, the function name `aTypicalDay` is one of the poorest naming choice I've seen in a while. Is it typical or atypical ?

wouldnt't atypical day be atypicalDay and a typical day be aTypicalDay? following camel case nomenclature the function name seems to suggest a typical day and is aptly named.

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#38

Post by [deleted] »

pinouchon wrote: post #14
AlexC04 wrote: post #2

well first thing - that code at the top can be simplified. function getDevJob(studying, hardwork, luck){ return study && hardwork && luck; } But more seriously - I actually really like point #2. I firmly believe that job interviews have a strong bias towards people with experience doing job interviews. Your "offer-ladder" seems to confirm that for me. It reminds me of that freakonomics article about how real estate a…

While we're at it, the function name `aTypicalDay` is one of the poorest naming choice I've seen in a while. Is it typical or atypical ?

[deleted]

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#39

Post by svachalek »

pinouchon wrote: post #14
AlexC04 wrote: post #2

well first thing - that code at the top can be simplified. function getDevJob(studying, hardwork, luck){ return study && hardwork && luck; } But more seriously - I actually really like point #2. I firmly believe that job interviews have a strong bias towards people with experience doing job interviews. Your "offer-ladder" seems to confirm that for me. It reminds me of that freakonomics article about how real estate a…

While we're at it, the function name `aTypicalDay` is one of the poorest naming choice I've seen in a while. Is it typical or atypical ?

In camel-casing, a capital letter indicates the start of a new word. Therefore this is clearly "a typical day" while "atypical day" would be "atypicalDay".

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#40

Post by steve-howard »

throwawaysbdif wrote: post #21
Slackwise wrote: post #7

This whole hardcore quizzing and testing during interviews has to go. As far as I can see, all it does is create selection bias for people who memorize things or like to practice interview questions. Maybe that's just me being too old for that kinda' crap.

I have been interviewing the last couple months and have the same opinion. I've been coding for years and have some pretty complex stuff up on my GitHub. I quickly found out that nobody looks at your GitHub, maybe 10% max. didn't matter that I had code from two weeks ago that did complex segmented locking on a concurrent hashtable. still got asked "what is threading" level questions at every place. After botching my…

I'm not shocked that nobody looks at your GitHub. Reading other people's code takes time and energy that a lot of people aren't going to spend if they have a ton of candidates to sift through.
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