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Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
51–60 of 766 posts
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#52> No one believes that anyone can actually code.
Is it just our industry where you have to prove you aren't a complete impostor every time? Basically we treat every applicant like they are Frank Abagnale [0].
A senior role should be focused on more overall system and performance aspects of the software, using good practices.
What does writing out a solution for fizzbuzz (or equivalent) prove during an interview? If they do it easily do you suspect they memorized it (our base assumption seems to be they are an impostor right)? If they fail, do they fail the interview?
In the real world if you had a database call in some recursive loop that would be bad for performance. The number of times I jump to using recursion in a solution is near zero.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#53Number 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 generall…
"We will need to compare feedback but I'm confident we will be in touch soon".
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#54> 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…
At times, I have tried to press a contact from a job lead on what I could have done better in my interview. They will not give you even a single bit of feedback--a seemingly innocuous yes or no question is met with dissembling or equivocation, always.
What bothers me most is that employers don't seem to be showing equal commitment to the interviewing process. They will ask you to do hours worth of homework for them, but then can't be arsed to discuss it with you for five minutes. They will ask for your salary history, but clam up if you ask them what they pay other developers in the same position. They will take your application as a senior developer, then ask if you'd consider being an entry-level tester. They spend hours grilling you to prove your worth, then spend zero minutes trying to sell you on their company.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#55Number 2: No One Believes Anyone Can Actually Code It's surprising to see the number of people who interview for lead technical roles that cannot code, or whose work is exceptionally sloppy. Incompetence is more commonplace than the author believes, even at the highest level.
Seriously. I've sat on the hiring side. I've seen impressive resumes. I've had reasonable discussions with people. And then I give them a very, very trivial coding exercise (a take home, they're free to Google, do it on their own computer, in their own IDE, in their professed preferred language), in a time frame that while constrained is still plenty...and the result is -terrible-. I can try and come up with reasons…
It's weird, I've heard plenty of stories about this kind of thing but when I sat on the hiring side and interviewed for intermediate roles (couldn't even afford senior) I didn't come across anybody who was stumped and simply couldn't code.
There were people who were bad at (possibly some because they were under pressure), it but nobody who couldn't do it at all.
I wasn't giving out a trivial question either.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#56Number 7: Companies Really Want to Know Your Salary; Don’t tell Them
So true. Do not tell them!
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#57> No one believes that anyone can actually code. Is it just our industry where you have to prove you aren't a complete impostor every time? Basically we treat every applicant like they are Frank Abagnale [0]. A senior role should be focused on more overall system and performance aspects of the software, using good practices. What does writing out a solution for fizzbuzz (or equivalent) prove during an interview? If t…
> Is it just our industry where you have to prove you aren't a complete impostor every time? Basically we treat every applicant like they are Frank Abagnale [0].
The problem is that a large majority of candidates lie on their resumes. This means that hiring managers have to work harder to qualify a good candidate -- which often ends up turning into a process that hurts and annoys those that are actually qualified.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#58Thank you for writing this post. It was informative. A few comments from a fellow software developer who is approaching 50... I don't think the coding test isn't there because people think you're lying, it's there because we have no industry wide, respected entrance exam. Actuarial interviews don't (to my knowledge) contain a whiteboard vector calculus exam, but this isn't because people just sort of believe actuarie…
> ...who nodded gravely as the CEO talked about the desperate shortage of software developers.
This comment is exactly why reading about "interview gymnastics" like this really pisses me off.
Its also why I wonder how many big tech companies are somehow able to hire so many people... With processes like these, you'd think that they either have a "secret backdoor" or never managed to actually hire more than a dozen or so.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#59The "No One Believes Anyone Can Actually Code" point is right on the money by my anecdotal experience. Just a few weeks ago I was asked to implement FizzBuzz in an interview for the first time in my 15 years of engineering! This was despite having a large amount of verifiable open source Haskell projects.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#60> No one believes that anyone can actually code. Is it just our industry where you have to prove you aren't a complete impostor every time? Basically we treat every applicant like they are Frank Abagnale [0]. A senior role should be focused on more overall system and performance aspects of the software, using good practices. What does writing out a solution for fizzbuzz (or equivalent) prove during an interview? If t…
We do a fizzbuzz-like question, but one we created ourselves so it's not easily google-able or memorizable.
Anyone with basic coding chops should be able to solve it; it would be equivalent to a CS101 quiz.
It is still shocking how many people fail it. Yes, we have to test for it. My wife is in digital marketing, her -boss-, who insists on being involved in every decision, and will override her knowledgeable subordinates based on her own feelings, knows nothing about digital marketing (and is the reason my wife is looking to change jobs), but nevertheless managed to impress people above her (who also know nothing about digital marketing, but to be fair, don't have marketing related titles or roles) with her resume. Imposters in jobs are super common; it's just that in development we have easy ways to check for basic understanding. Unfortunately we try to scale those up to look for expert level understanding, and that fails (because we're really bad at testing for expert level understanding in areas we actually care about. That 'implement a red black tree' is probably appropriate if your company builds a data structure library as part of their core product, and probably inappropriate for almost anything else).