Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.freecodecamp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 398 posts

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

#121

Post by nathan_f77 »

krosaen wrote: post #64
sfaf wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't rails count as a backend engineer? Would you also not count someone who works with Django as a backend engineer?

I would definitely distinguish between html / css / javascript and server side application code, be it in ruby or python, I just didn't think working on the server side application logic completed the "full stack". To me full stack means you are into the systems a bit too and would be capable of setting up the stack itself (and perhaps enhancing it, or setting up custom batch systems), not just working effectively wi…

I think you could describe that as full-stack + devops. Full-stack generally just means backend + front-end.

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

#122

Post by rmc »

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…

Wait till you hear about US Employment law! Your London salary includes a lot of things that are uncommon for US tech salaries.

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

#123

Post by to3m »

cagataygurturk wrote: post #78

So whoever hired the guy should feel bad. He explains the strategy to boost his payroll, he was hiding the bootcamp he was attending and he was showing himself as experienced dev. And also why would you hire someone if 300 other companies were not interested in that person? Ironically his lack of experience shows itself even in the first fancy function he writes on the blog post. Would not this unnecessary if block b…

I always read that sort of if block as the mark of somebody who's been round the block a few times. Because they know that one day you'll want to place a breakpoint on one case or the other, and they know that one day they'll want to know what the value of the condition is before it's used, and one day they'll want to put some logging in, and so on - and they know they won't thank their old selves for making that harder.

This sort of hard-won experience is how you get the high salaries, you know...

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

#124

Post by Bartweiss »

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.

Honestly, I think the reason its still around is because it approximates "write FizzBuzz", which people should be asking.

People ask the 'quiz' stuff, successfully throw out some bad candidates who talked a good game on experience/theory, and assume its a good way to go.

The ideal middle ground is probably to offer ultra-basic code problems, ideally before an onsite. It's awkward, but it really is necessary to filter the non-programming applicants. And by not trying to be clever, you don't create an incentive to memorize Rabin-Karp and generally acquire useless interview-only skills.

Even for those still doing testing interviews, that's a good rule of thumb: if it was a paper-worthy insight originally, it's a ridiculous thing to make someone derive in an interview.

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

#125

Post by nemo44x »

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…

Part of it is folks in the UK, and even London in particular, get paid quite a bit less than Americans.

My wife is from the UK and has worked in London and NYC and she makes quite a bit more money in NYC. She has told me there's no way she'd make her salary in London and it would probably be quite a bit less. She doesn't work in software either; she works in finance.

I think part of it is it simply costs a whole lot more to employ someone in the UK. All those social benefits have a cost and companies have to pay them. It's also much harder to fire someone in the UK than the USA where you can be fired on the spot for no reason at all. The benefits the company has to pay out are technically none except for some unemployment insurance for a few months which is quite small all things considered.

We've talked about moving to the UK but our lifestyle would change for the negative we believe due to the low salaries and the very high cost of living anywhere near London. Especially with the beating the Pound has taken recently when we convert our dollars to Pounds there's no way we'd get close to our current income.

To be honest I'm not sure how you folks do it. The UK is expensive and people simply do with less in general. That's not such a bad thing either.

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

#126

Post by patricklynch »

_petronius wrote: post #57
gxs wrote: post #34

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 effect…

My sense is that it's just a good way to annoy people whose job isn't hiring. At best, you're risking annoying someone who is busy (and your email being deleted with no reply), at worst, you're actively penalizing yourself if you are demonstrating that you aren't willing to go through the standard hiring process that the company uses. (For other terrible ways that job applicants try to "stand out", Ask A Manager is a…

The fact that his response rate when from If anything, assuming most companies have an 'employee referral' program, emailing a random non-recruiter may have the additional advantage that, for no cost to you, someone at that company becomes incentivized for several thousand dollars to lobby for you.

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

#127

Post by jankedout »

drewrv wrote: post #22
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'm gonna put on my tin foil hat and say: maybe companies interview like this in order to filter out the people who are too old for this kinda crap.

This style is really filtering those who "don't have time," not by age.

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

#128

Post by seangrogg »

bluedino wrote: post #120

>> I applied to 291 companies, did 32 phone screens, 16 technical screens, 13 coding challenges, 11 on-sites, and received 8 offers. How much time would that take? Figure 15 minutes per company - 4,365 minutes, or 72 hours. And that's time just spent finding the company, changing around a cover letter, and then emailing it and responding etc. 32 phone screens? Let's say 30 minutes each, that's 960 minutes, or 16 hour…

There tends to be a relatively large number of initial applications that are more or less A/B tests - do companies respond well when I showcase my React project or my stint at a startup? Should I bother writing that I have Mongo experience even if they're not hiring for it? And so on.

I haven't really applied for jobs since getting my first - just keeping communication open with recruiters generates more than I can keep up with all the time.

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

#129

Post by ryanmccullagh »

I wonder how much Live Coding he had to do. I've been interviewing like crazy lately, and I've learned I hate live coding, and "thinking out loud". You're in a room with your laptop hooked up to the monitor, and 2 people are watching you code. Any small typing mistake or mouse movements can be a negative on your review. Live coding should die.

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

#130

Post by Bartweiss »

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…

The whole issue is a really weird mixed bag, where good interviewers struggle to weed out awful candidates without harassing strong ones.

"What is threading" actually doesn't bother me, because it's shockingly easy to find experienced backend devs who have no idea - even when they've used MapReduce!

The file I/O one is far more obnoxious, because low-level file interactions are so rarely a good idea in most languages. In general, the right way to handle that remains "scripting" right up until it becomes "framework". And if someone expects that file I/O as part of a larger problem, they should probably accept anything sensible-looking or offer you a couple of method names like "getTextLine" to avoid the whole issue.

The whole process is broken, certainly, but its broken on both ends.

Post reply on HN