41–50 of 85 posts
You said you "blew" five interviews without providing any information or taking any responsibility. Also, you say that you've been doing development for 20 years. Do you think you're entitled to something purely based on your experience, even though it might not be relevant?
Also, five interviews is just a drop in the bucket. What did you expect your interview pass rate to be, over 20%? That seems highly unrealistic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I shudder at the thought of being a dentist. Imagine your first day on the job, looking into people's mouths all day... then going home and thinking that this is what you will do every working day for the next 40 years. Dentists, I heard, have high rates of substance abuse, depression and suicide. These are very talented people (they have to be to gain admission to dentistry), who have to spend their life... doing de…
I doubt looking into mouths is a big deal. I don't see how that's any worse or better than being a surgeon. The problem is so much of dentistry is cosmetics which is a horribly shallow thing to be dedicating your life to.
Also, interviewing is partly arbitrary hazing to make incumbents feel valuable.
Five is not very many interviews at all. 30 would be significant. In good interviewing, much more time is wasted to have many more offers.
If you're going for instant respect, wage slavery is the wrong port to chat up. It's always earned over time by demonstrating invaluable performance as useful to the current business "growing pains."
Finally, the usual standards: positive, hygiene (no nasty ear, nose, neck hair), fit, energetic, quick, confident and dressed impeccably. And, all the usual canned answer "brain teasers" which are Glugglable. Perhaps tactfully-suggesting how such arbitrary mental fappenings apply to the job without pointing out how they are often ineffective shortcuts which may make the interviewer feel superior. Oh joys of big ol' corporations and their bloat and waste.
I interviewed a guy once who was trying to talk his way into a VP-level position. Except he was talking to me, and I was just a hired hand suited only to make a recommendation for a n additional developer. The guy had a sound mind but the company was not hiring for his role.
At the same time, I mostly don't want to work at the companies that do puzzle interviews, though you may feel differently. A lot of times these center on approaches like recursion algorithms, but I'm a full-stack/backend web developer, and I've written less than 10 recursion functions for production. I now ask these interviewers how often they write recursion algorithms and the answer I usually get the line "oh it's just useful to know the underlying concept," except it isn't. I can write them, but I don't care for them, and the concept isn't particularly mind-blowing, and you'll have to explain it to the rest of your team.
Anyway, hang in there, best wishes
Tough but not unusual. For the record, I'm 33 and I have had a similar experience. I am not sure it has anything to do with your age but ageism is very real and I am trying to prepare for it because 40, assuming I'll make it, is just around the corner. I did 3 interviews so far this month and even though I didn't get any rejections, I still don't have any offers. Things around here do move slow(Australia) but I am no…
You could also plan for another life (style) (because approaching 40 for which we started planning early 30s) which is what my wife and myself did. We prepared a few years to make sure (we invested money and time in that) we had remote gigs all over the world set up and then moved to a much cheaper country and to the cheapest part of that country. Not only did we find, after a while, that life is actually nicer, we d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone seeking a job, yes, it's unfortunate. But from an employer's perspective, false negatives are safer than false positives.
>> As someone seeking a job, yes, it's unfortunate. But from an employer's perspective, false negatives are safer than false positives. - Are you an employer complaining there is a shortage of good developers? - How many candidates have you rejected in the past? - How many of those were because of a bullshit interview question? (Eg: Find the maximum subarray of an input array in O(n)...cannot be brute force....within…
I've been in that situation: Once, at an old job, I had put in for a new role that had been created. There was also an outside candidate who'd applied for the role. Management felt that having me interview this candidate would have been a conflict of interest, considering, so I wasn't asked to participate.
I knew within 30 seconds of meeting him that he wouldn't last. He didn't. They gave him three months, and we all agreed in retrospect that he shouldn't have been hired at all.
In the interim, I did my old job, as well as his job (in the form of handholding him through everything he did more complicated than surfing the web), and was very quickly given the title of "Senior $role", with him as a direct report.
The other engineers and I spent hours, daily, working hand in hand with him, correcting his code, repeatedly suggesting the same things he could do to avoid having those problems with his code in the first place, &c.
That's just one example of what the thing I thought the grandparent meant by "false positive" can cost you. I'm sure there are worse.
But, I'm going to be bold. I'm going to out on the limb and suggest that: maybe it's not being asked "RANDOM shite," but maybe your attitude. Generally speaking, I've had to do three to five or so interviews to get an offer. Depending on the market and the timing, I've had far, far worse. I once spent four months trying to find something, anything. So, here are a few thoughts for you or anyone else.
People who have 10 years (or claim 10 years) C#/SQL are a dime-a-dozen. You're competing in a market that is dying, the same way Java developers are dying: a smaller and smaller group of employers who are stuck on the tech. Microsoft lost, which is why they are trying so desperately to incorporate Linux/Open Source technologies. You're going to be valuable to company if you're either inexpensive or the best-of-the-best. Your skill set is dated. Get it back into shape. Luckily, our profession is one of the cheapest to retool. Unfortunately, you should have been doing this two years ago. Spend your free time learning, always. Get yourself up to speed with NodeJS/Vue/React, etc. If you don't have experience with Linux, get it.
Companies want one of two things: a reason to hire you or a reason to not hire you. Be involved in that process. Is it a really a random problem? Or, are they trying to gauge how you think and approach problems? How did you respond to it? Were you inquisitive or were you as hostile as this post? When I've been a hiring manager, I always ask questions like, "How many baseballs will fit in a 747?" Good candidates say, "Well, I'll just estimate that a 747 is 100 feet long and 30 feet wide and so.." Great ones will point out that if packed it full, it may be overweight to fly. Bad ones say, "I don't know." The interview is there for you to present what you know and what you're interested in. Your resume should be tailored to present things can talk about. It's all about selling you. If you have a recruiter, talk with him or her. If you're not using a recruiter, get one. Have them get feedback on the interview. Then, take it to heart. Period.
On the flip side, there are companies want conformity. You're either "it" or not. If I don't get an offer, I don't want the job. There is zero point in being in a place that questions your ability to fit in. I've gotten turned down from some pretty cool places, but that's life. I wouldn't have had the career or the friends in my profession that I do had some of those jobs worked out. I even found out later that whole groups of people got laid-off, quit, etc.
The important thing is: getting a job is not a right and it doesn't come from meritocracy. It's people looking for people who solve the problems the company has and doesn't bring more problems to the company. Think about it from their perspective and try to figure out how you, your experience, and your attitude is benefit for them. If you've been in this profession for several decades, you have it in you.
By the way, my first computer was at nine and it had 4k of RAM. I always sell that: "So, I got into computers when I was nine. After punching in two plus two and see it spit back four, I instantly wanted to know how it could possibly know that. I've never stopped learning since." Right then and there I set the tone for the company: You may have problems I don't understand, but I will figure out the answer.
Tough but not unusual. For the record, I'm 33 and I have had a similar experience. I am not sure it has anything to do with your age but ageism is very real and I am trying to prepare for it because 40, assuming I'll make it, is just around the corner. I did 3 interviews so far this month and even though I didn't get any rejections, I still don't have any offers. Things around here do move slow(Australia) but I am no…
You could also plan for another life (style) (because approaching 40 for which we started planning early 30s) which is what my wife and myself did. We prepared a few years to make sure (we invested money and time in that) we had remote gigs all over the world set up and then moved to a much cheaper country and to the cheapest part of that country. Not only did we find, after a while, that life is actually nicer, we d…
The idea of keeping expenses down and foregoing frivolous luxuries is what allows me to wait for a better offer inbetween jobs if i needed to. So I strongly agree with that bit.
1. I feel strongly that people should be allowed to prepare for interviews by seeing the actual questions. In fact, I think the questions should be public. What might these questions be? I want to immediately know if someone took the time to do some diligence and also to make certain that my own biases didn't cause me to avoid hard questions for candidates I liked.
2. I don't want to ask something which can be easily googled. Simple answers aren't any good; I need something where it is open ended enough and the answers to the question can be "good enough" where I feel the completeness is sufficient for the role.
3. I need to be able to practically communicate what the real purpose of the role is. the Job posting will not always be allowed to do that, but through the interview I need to make it clear what work I actually need done. Should I do this via questions (keep this a secret from the interviewer) or tell them the honest truth and risk losing potentially excellent employees. Both employee and employer have high frictional costs in this case.
4. Interviews are a mostly artificial format - similar things do happen in sales and client-facing scenarios, but usually in a toned down way. In an interview, the risk of performance is entirely on the person interviewing, in a customer-facing scenario, the person is representing the company, but also has the company support behind them. How could you put the interview into a position where the interviewee felt as if the company interviewing them would back them up to help them succeed? (could you do a pair interview where someone already hired for the role helps them work on an interview problem, while someone else interviews them?)