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Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

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Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#41

Post by Klathmon »

mrfusion wrote: post #34
Klathmon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I was approached about a new opportunity, and through the course of the interviews I was given a generic fizzbuzz-like coding challenge and I completely bombed it. I got flustered, I got stuck on something trivial, and I ended up running out of time with not much to show for it. It was in a language that I had been using for 5+ years at that point, using a framework that I had just finished architecti…

I think this is most people who “can’t code”. Just nerves I’ve been in that situation myself.

It was like waking up and not knowing your own name, it was such a strange feeling to watch myself fuck up so badly, and be utterly incapable of stopping during the interview.

And I wasn't even particularly nervous about getting or not getting the offer either! They approached me, and I wasn't fully sure if I would even like the job yet!

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#42

Post by jiveturkey »

kenoyer130 wrote: post #23

Number 1: I think this is due to specializing in Ruby on Rails which is falling out of favor? Or your city location? I know in my location the average job hunt is 2 weeks. Number 2: As someone that interviews people alot, this is cuz MANY people who apply CANNOT code, no matter what their resume says. We have had people leave and never come back during our console app on site test (read in a text file and print out i…

> At the end of the interview, I would recommend asking "are there any concerns or issues you would have with hiring me for this position?" and LISTEN to their feedback.

At the end of each interviewer. Asking the HR person at the end of it all is a waste of time for 2 reasons:

1. they won’t know yet

2. they won’t tell you

but the tech interviewer almost certainly isn’t trained to keep his mouth shut and also generally isn’t expecting this question. caught off guard, you can usually get a close to honest response. you do have to interpret a little because people generally don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings right to their face. apply modern day party invite response rules:

    yes: maybe
  maybe: no
     no: fuck no

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#43

Post by Humdeee »

> As a hiring manager, I’ve given homework assignments to weed out candidates from the pack but I always kept it reasonable, just a few hours in length.

"Just" a few hours has always, always been an underestimation when I've tried these. I've been burned a handful of times now; both from my time and from my belief that it would amount to something. I'm reminded of one instance where follow up emails kept coming after submission: "Add in this now." "Okay, now this." "Handle this." I consider myself an average engineer. I'm not interested in increasing my sample size to try and average out variance any longer.

I'm looking outside to one of the first sunny, warm days we've had here in months. I can't think of anything more I'd rather not do than some arbitrary company hiring project. I simply pass on these now and politely pull out from consideration.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#44

Post by hinkley »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #16
aquadrop wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do they do on their 'real work'?

>write something "does it work? no." >googling... >copy code block "does it work? kinda..." >googling...

At my job we have so many libraries in different parts of the code trying to do the same thing that I don’t even try to memorize anymore. I just look it up.

What’s the order of arguments on this one? Does it modify the data passed in or create a new one? How does it handle nulls?

It’s cheaper to look it up than to debug. So that’s what I do.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#45

Post by dragonwriter »

newssucker wrote: post #27

From the article "The general thing that I saw from everyone that I talked to is that no one actually believes that anyone can code. At every stage in the interview process, you’re going to need to prove that your resume isn’t a lie and that you can actually do what you say you can. I find this ludicrous because it is like interviewing an attorney and then saying to him “Please prove that you can cite a Supreme Court…

> I find this ludicrous because it is like interviewing an attorney and then saying to him “Please prove that you can cite a Supreme Court precedent”.

They don't need to do that for lawyers because the bar exam handles that (and, for those with traditional legal education, the highly-standardized law school curriculum.) The programming “profession” has neither of those features.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#46

Post by gain_sky »

This article is weird. His resume looks impressive and it looks like he has done some solid work but from the article he sounds like he feels entitled because of it. Also I find it annoying how little he mentions about the kind of companies hes applying to or even what country he's in (apart from one reference to a company in California so I guess we can assume he's in the USA).

> If an HR person says to me “Oh and we administer a coding test” then my first response is “I’ve taken a bunch of those, which one do you use?”.

If I was hiring and a candidate said that to me on the phone I probably wouldn't invite them for an in-person interview.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#47

Post by tboyd47 »

Ocerge wrote: post #36
tboyd47 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All my best jobs were found via recruiters. Different strokes, I guess.

I found my current gig by using a recruiter I was referred to by a respected coworker, and it's by far the best job I've ever had (out of 5 or so). Super small sample size I know, but if you can find a recruiter that you can trust/isn't just pimping you out for a payday and nothing else, you can skip a ton of bullshit.

There's a huge variation in recruiter quality and it's pretty easy to tell the good ones from the bad. Just spend a couple of weeks taking calls and emails and following leads and you learn quick.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#48

Post by nathanaldensr »

Klathmon wrote: post #19
golergka wrote: post #2

> When did an entire industry of people get pre-judged as lying? That's the kind of thing that happens when people lie. Everybody who's ever hired engineers knows from experience that a simple Fizzbuzz test is still, unfortunately, a very usable candidate filter. A lot of candidates with years of real work experience simply cannot write code. How else can we find this out?

A few years ago I was approached about a new opportunity, and through the course of the interviews I was given a generic fizzbuzz-like coding challenge and I completely bombed it. I got flustered, I got stuck on something trivial, and I ended up running out of time with not much to show for it. It was in a language that I had been using for 5+ years at that point, using a framework that I had just finished architecti…

Some of the most important skills programmers should have--in my opinion, more important than writing code--are reading code, debugging, adjusting to the project management strategy of the company, and interacting in functional ways with the team.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#49

Post by lifeisstillgood »

larrik wrote: post #30

I've been involved in hiring senior engineers for a while now, and here's a few counterpoints: 1) Ruby is hard to get a job in, so you are off to a rough start. 2) A lot of people with lots of experience actually can't code for crap. Do you know how many python developers I see that don't know the difference between a tuple and list? Like, how could you be a real dev if you never even wondered why sometimes you use […

I think the main point from a candidate perspective is that long, unusual or difficult interview processes are fine as long as we have already decided we really want to work for you (that is you are Trello or SpaceX or some amazing startup we love)

otherwise, just as you are faced with picking a rose from a faceless mass of candidates so are we faced with picking a decent place to work from a faceless mass of mission statements and "100%code coverage" blog posts (if we can find any)

And 2) yes I can believe it - that's what fizzbuzz and its ilk are for. The number of companies offering hackerrank/codility tests and justifying it as we only hire the very best has left the lake woebegone test way behind.

There has to be some middle ground - where someone can pass a basic capability test to weed out the crap without demanding several hours of coding. I mean I spent two evenings recently polishing up a "Oyster card system for TFL" as a hurdle for a government department I have been angling to get in for a year. A no-name corporations wanting CRUD development can take a running jump if it thinks my evenings come cheap.

(amazingly at the turn of the century I used to use "has listed Python on CV" as a marker of "worth an interview" - it was rare enough and indicated an interest outside of corporate mainstream. Maybe Erlang today??)

Edit:

So my compromise suggestion is for companies to say "We have an OSS project (or even recommend one of the bigger ones). Take any of these 5 bugs and supply a pull-request"

At least then the evenings work is not totally wasted and you get to see an important skill - how fast can they come up to speed on an unfamiliar codebase?

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#50

Post by treis »

LandR wrote: post #12

> Number 1: It Takes Longer than Ever to Get Hired Last twice I've looked for a developer job, I got offered a position and was hired within 2 weeks. > No one believes that anyone can actually code. Quite rightly, most devs can't code. > Extensive homework is now normal. Not been my experience, I've done some homework assignments but none were ever more than 1 hours work (and then even the standard of the tests were…

>Last twice I've looked for a developer job, I got offered a position and was hired within 2 weeks.

His resume is the problem. Two immediate things: (1) His most recent job lists junior level work and (2) He is claiming 3 concurrent jobs over the last two years.

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