131–140 of 674 posts
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Nobody does that because being smart is of no guarantee that this person can be of any use to a business.
Are you entirely excluding university recruiting from this? Because consulting firms and investment banks routinely recruit smart people without any demonstrable experience doing what those companies plan to train them to do.
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Why should skilled developers with extensive track-records in their field be forced to use their free time to cram for college-style exams? Other professions dealing with exact-sciences / engineering don't seem to have this problem..
While I agree with the sentiment, I wouldn't call it "college-style exams", to be honest. Colleges would be quite different if exams were conducted one-on-one, and instructor would have been willing to talk with you through the problem and cared more about your thought train and approach rather than the exact solution. In fact, I am pretty sure that if you just knew the correct solution and the answer to the coding i…
And if you write out the answer in silence, be prepared for a "tell me how it works" follow-up.
Well, in their defense (Google/Amazon/Facebook etc), a team leader or any other particular person cannot interview 500 applicants, so either more people are interviewers or they are way more specific with initial resume (which can be fake to a big extend). I don't like algorithm questions either but at least they optimize by time, the alternative is to have people in for a few days, or spend a day doing chat intervie…
I used to ignore it, but I've decided since that while I'm not going to be remotely interested in the role they've proposed, I can at least clarify my background and career level should they have something more appropriate.
And for the total form email recruiter spam, I'll sometimes reply asking their rate range for W2 and 1099. I never get a response to those. Well, I'm lying, I did once and it was to say "let's discuss it on a call." No thanks, that means it's low. And being a small world up here, I knew who the client was anyway, and what they were trying to do. I had no business getting that email.
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I don't know about the average but at Google I probably write a new call to std::set::find twice an hour, and it's important to know that std::set is a red-black tree, and how std::set::find is implemented and how much that costs and so forth. Fluency with data structures and algorithms is not some kind of brain candy. It's absolutely necessary to get the job done.
I understand the perfomance characteristics of red/black trees very well. I couldn't implement one in 30 minutes on a whiteboard.
Unlike most of HN (it seems), I like hearing from recruiters, because despite the very low signal-to-noise ratio, there's always that remote chance that one of them could be able to set me up with a "dream job". It's zero cost to me to politely reply to a recruiter and ask for more info, and I try to at least respond to everyone. What I've found is that they must have a lot of candidates they're juggling because fall…
I make it a point to reply to recruiters. But there's many different types of recruiting email. I completely ignore (and sometimes even filter straight to the trash) blatantly shotgunned form emails. If the email shows any effort whatsoever, mentioning a project I worked on, mentioning my current job, pointing out the role in question would fit my skills and it actually does, basically anything at all that suggests i…
Its the London Cabbie(1) method. They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people (for the value of smart that fits their biases). They just need as many warm bodies as possible to ram through their test so that a few trickle out the bottom of the funnel to keep the ranks from shrinking. If too many started getting hired, they'd add competitive basket weaving to the skillset if t…
And in theory it should totally be worth it as a candidate unless they are coasting on reputation. Otherwise the supply of candidates would dry up. In practice it wasn't for me, but I refused to tell them how much I made just to see what would happen. If you interview at Google and they ask how much you make you should probably tell them or you might get a weak non-negotiable offer. Unless what you make is already fa…
Its the London Cabbie(1) method. They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people (for the value of smart that fits their biases). They just need as many warm bodies as possible to ram through their test so that a few trickle out the bottom of the funnel to keep the ranks from shrinking. If too many started getting hired, they'd add competitive basket weaving to the skillset if t…
> They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people I've found this to be decidedly not true, from many recruiter contacts. They have a role in mind they're trying to fill and if you point out that it's far more junior than what you're looking for, the conversation's over. Think about how must companies hire. The hiring manager fights internally and finally gets a req for a very s…
The recruiter may start out with a role that they are trying to fill, but they have plenty of other roles that they could be happy to put you in. And furthermore for the right candidate, they don't have to figure out the role up front.
When I was hired by Google, SRE poached me out of a pipeline to a different group. (Accepting that offer was a mistake on both sides, but it was a learning experience.) When I was hired by Amazon, I was contacted for a job in Seattle, then got hired in Orange County.
That said, plenty of candidates start the process by being too arrogant about what they can demand. Recruiters know to look for that and stop wasting their own time taking these people seriously. That's why pointing out that a proposed role is too junior for you is likely to result in being dropped.