541–550 of 1001 posts
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Yes but you can tell the difference without a whiteboard or take home test, right?
I think so, I personally prefer the "look at this already written code, what does it do and can we find any bugs or issues?", less stressful and more collaborative, but good luck getting any non-startup size company to let you do it.
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licensing might not be a bad route, similar to a carpenter's license or a bar exam
Licensing probably could work in this industry but it would be a tough nut to implement. For starters, as others have mentioned, with so much change happening, re-licensing would probably be needed, and of course that's a huge cost, a pain, and overhead as well. But then again, as I think about potential solutions, I am kind of coming up dry. Really need to mull on this some more.
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Real talk? I'd be concerned that, at a non-tech company, I'd be seen as a IT rather than a software engineer. And the conventional wisdom goes that IT is a cost center. Some of the best career advice I've ever gleaned is to work on something that visibly makes money for the company. I get to do that every day at my tech company. I don't know that I could say that if I worked in a technical capacity in another industr…
The best "work environment" tech job I ever had was at an investment bank. Didn't disrupt anything (quite the opposite) but got great experience with databases, unix, C, scripting, working with internal clients, determining requirements, managing projects, etc. 9:00 - 4:30 daily hours, no nights, no weekends. Full benefits, good salary, good yearly bonus, quiet office, great people who were there to get a job done an…
Yes, a lot of adults wear sweatshirts and hoodies now. However, if you wore a shirt and tie to a high school, they would make fun of you for dressing up like your dad. We have collectively agreed on a "grown-up" attire.
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Real talk? I'd be concerned that, at a non-tech company, I'd be seen as a IT rather than a software engineer. And the conventional wisdom goes that IT is a cost center. Some of the best career advice I've ever gleaned is to work on something that visibly makes money for the company. I get to do that every day at my tech company. I don't know that I could say that if I worked in a technical capacity in another industr…
Real talk? There is nothing wrong with being in IT. Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". You're a carpenter. You nail boards together to serve the business interests of the company. Even if the boards are SQL queries or ReactJS or whatever. Companies need tech. You can bring value by making everyone's jobs better with your technology - sand off those…
Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. In an ideal world, you could trust someone's resume. e.g. "I've written large production programs in C." Ok, great, so then clearly this person knows C so there should be no need to dissect code or run them thru some linked list algorithm and see if they know how to use pointers correctly. Yet, we do. Ok, then what about open source contributions (if they have…
Unfortunately there are about 1000 competing bodies trying to be this association. It seems that the tech crowd would rather in-fight than work together to be treated seriously.
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Solving a problem within a fixed time period is the best real world scenario for programmers. No project has an unlimited budget, so no one gets unlimited time in the real world.
> Solving a problem within a fixed time period is the best real world scenario for programmers. Not if the fixed time period is 45 minutes with an interviewer looking over your shoulder.
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So a little more on the interview. I've got a laptop setup with eclipse, all rigged up with an integration test and filled out function signatures. I show the interviewee what to press to compile, and the subsequent failing tests. The code builds in it's initial state, but the tests fail. I also show them on the desktop that the original source is squirreled away in case they fat finger and erase everything (I've tot…
Todd, is that you? Sounds a lot like the process used by someone I worked with years ago. It sounds to me like you’ve done some careful thinking about this, and it doesn’t sound unreasonable. One of my beefs really gets down to the interview process turning into a one-way grilling, dehumanizing the candidate into a “code monkey.” It sounds to me like you are trying really hard to evaluate their technical skills, but…
Bingo.
A hiring process that attempts to convert the multidimensionality of humans to a handful of numeric variables is essentially trying to hire the best drone out there, not the best human fit for the job.
I learn more about candidates from the types of questions they ask me, and their reply to open-ended questions I ask them, than from any technical grilling test.
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If I want a junior person, I place an ad for a junior person. We do quite well with those. If I want somebody with 5 years of experience, it's because I need someone who has already got familiarity with the tools and can apply good judgement. I have had both positions open simultaneously on occasion, and discovered the same people applying for both. Some of them were even qualified for the junior position.
You removed the word "related" in this reply. I think our contention centers mainly around this word. When I see the word related I envision most standard job offers that have a laundry list of 10+ technologies, not all of them particularly related. Software engineering is such a wide field with such a huge array of available technology options that if you're limiting to 5+ years in a specific stack you're already ma…
If I ask for five years of related experience, I mean that if my list includes an object-oriented language with a well-known framework, I expect to see someone who has worked with an object-oriented language with a well-known framework and has perhaps dabbled in the particular one I mentioned.
Instead I get many resumes from people who have never used an object-oriented language to contribute to any software project that wasn't assigned by their professor. They haven't got five years of experience, period.
Does that help?
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Many programmers make nowhere near $100k and so many programmers do a ton of extra unpaid work; and week-long interview preparations are just one of them. Just last night, a fellow programmer I know is being forced into "mandatory unpaid overtime" for the purposes of learning new things for his company. He has to learn more crap, together with coworkers, in his own 'freetime', regularly, unpaid. And I can tell you he…
The problem with your friend's situation is not a bad interview process, it's that they're being taken advantage of, and for some reason not improving their own situation, in a market where a good candidate is calling the shots on the terms of their employment.
If this were an actual employee‘s market, the friend might not be so underemployed.
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As someone who does a lot of interviewing, I tone down the technical stuff as the experience and responsibility level increases. I think a lot of the annoyances you mention still make sense for an entry level position, because there are a lot of folks who actually can't write code who apply for those jobs. For candidates with many years of experience, obviously they can and have been writing software effectively, so…
I have a PhD in Computer Science and 10 years in the industry, and I've never not been asked to do some trivial programming task in an interview. Thanks for showing some common sense, but most interviewers are just lazy. One time I couldn't implement a skiplist, and the feedback I got was "we were concerned about your problem solving skills".
I think you're overthinking the feedback you got.
If it was at one of the big names, they have the luxury of being picky. They can't hire every qualified candidate, so they have to reject most of them. As the interviewer, the company policy likely dictates the interviewer give a reason. Which puts the interviewer in a bind because it implies that there was a good reason for rejecting you. So they'll put canned statements like what you got.
I recently got rejected. And one of the reasons given was something that 3 of the 5 interviewers had explicitly told me they don't care about. I recognized it for what it was - they feel obligated to give some reason, so they nitpick after the fact even though they told you they were not going to nitpick.