Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by dmoy » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #55

lostcolony wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's a matter of scale (how many you interview) and how good the people in front of you filtering candidates are.

Go long enough interviewing hundreds, you'll see a few no matter what. Have a crappy enough filter in front and you'll see them right away.

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

#112

Post by vorpalhex » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

twodave wrote: post #83

vorpalhex wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that's a problem, but if I have an entire github of highly starred and heavily developed projects with reasonable commit histories... don't make me do your do damned homework or implement a toy BST. I have better things to do with my personal time than toy problems because you can't be bothered to open my github. The worst part is that usually these toy problems are justified with "but you can post this…

I'm not going to speak to the homework type of problem (because honestly I think you should be paid for that sort of thing), but I always ask people programming questions in on-site interviews, not strictly because I want them to prove they can program (although that's one useful side-effect), but because I want to observe the candidate's problem-solving process. I can't deduce anything like that from your Github or…

And that is entirely fine. I'm all for group white boarding exercises, or pair programming. I think there's a lot of value to be had in making sure the other person can communicate in a technical setting effectively, and explain why they make choices.

Likewise, if someone wants me to walk them through a project I have with explanations of what choices I made and why, I'm happy to do that. But please don't waste my time asking me to implement DFS, or write another twitter API client.

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

#113

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

calcifer wrote: post #78

haskellandchill wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is a myth, what do you estimate the figure is? I think under 10%, maybe under 5%. I have significant experience interviewing senior, junior, and mid-range candidates. 99% of my candidates can code, as in iterate over collections, write case statements, and call functions. I've only had one junior candidate who couldn't code at all. Sloppiness is rampant, but sloppy code that gets things done is what…

> 99% of my candidates can code, as in iterate over collections, write case statements, and call functions. Honestly, that's way too trivial to call "can code". I usually ask something less trivial, yet still extremely easy like "a function to check if a string is a palindrome" (I explain what a palindrome is) or "check if a substring exists in a given string". You wouldn't believe how many people "with 10 years expe…

Problem is: It's hard to judge the difference between someone who doesn't know what they are doing and someone who does but loses it under the extreme pressure of an interview wherein their entire future with the company is being determined by their performance on a 30 minute exercise.

Throughout my career, I've been in professional situations where I was under a lot of pressure: Having to explain failures to executives, near-impossibly tight deadlines, production outages. At least I haven't had to testify in front of Congress yet. Absolutely NOTHING I've encountered in my professional day-to-day has the extreme level of pressure of a typical silicon valley job interview.

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

#114

Post by annexrichmond » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

rambossa wrote: post #77

Side note/rant: I hate the Cracking the Coding Interview style... studying for these type of interviews is annoying. Trying to find a good video on youtube, where they aren't just naively coding up the bruteForce->optimal possible solutions, especially is irritating. It is literally a landscape of college kids with thousands of viewers who treat these interviews like the SAT. Even the author of the book produces vide…

and then some interviewers have the nerve to ask, "have you seen this question before?"

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

#115

Post by eanzenberg » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

calcifer wrote: post #78

haskellandchill wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is a myth, what do you estimate the figure is? I think under 10%, maybe under 5%. I have significant experience interviewing senior, junior, and mid-range candidates. 99% of my candidates can code, as in iterate over collections, write case statements, and call functions. I've only had one junior candidate who couldn't code at all. Sloppiness is rampant, but sloppy code that gets things done is what…

> 99% of my candidates can code, as in iterate over collections, write case statements, and call functions. Honestly, that's way too trivial to call "can code". I usually ask something less trivial, yet still extremely easy like "a function to check if a string is a palindrome" (I explain what a palindrome is) or "check if a substring exists in a given string". You wouldn't believe how many people "with 10 years expe…

How often do you need to write palindrome functions for your job?

Checking substring in a string is a 1 liner in languages like python.

I was at a final interview with FAANG. One question asked was to load a csv. I used pandas, it's a 1 liner. You could see the wretched face of the interviewer since he was expecting a

with open() as f: do_some_shit

and kept pushing me to write this on the board. I looked at him and said "Why? Why write your own method in a vanilla language? Give me a good reason."

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

#116

Post by matwood » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #40

I guess I don't understand why companies do this process. When I was hiring Senior engineers for Computer Vision and 3D rendering jobs my process was thus: 1. Post job and simultaneously search for engineers we thought were a good fit technically 2. Reach out to people I thought were qualified based on their specific previous work that was related to the job I was hiring for 3. Review submitted applications for relev…

> The second time, the guy did well with initial production, but over time he ended up using local college interns to write his code, who got other jobs and his commit speed fell off of a cliff.

Sounds like you should have moved him to management.

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

#117

Post by lucio » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 4:50 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #54

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…

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,…

It should be obligatory to give some feedback if the interview process is longer than one hour.

To simply give feedback is not a big deal to HR, and since they're making you do hours of homework it should be legally required to answer if you ask for feedback.

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

#118

Post by FLUX-YOU » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #50

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.

> (1) His most recent job lists junior level work

This shouldn't matter, chiefly because he has other work listed, so stopping at the first job post and forming an opinion makes the reader the problem. But also because people can sometimes take an easier job if they have life issues.

Secondly, these are consultancy gigs + 1 full time gig (or maybe it's part time) that could have a low hours/week commitment. He wouldn't be the first dev ever to moonlight.

Even if it were junior level work (trusting auth to be done correctly with junior engineers? LOL), he probably completed it faster than a junior engineer would.

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

#119

Post by jldugger » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

phaedrus wrote: post #109

lostcolony wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I once got knocked out of the running by a whiteboard-coding interview question that went something like "How would you find all triples from a list of a million integers, where the first two numbers add up to the third?" I said, "Hmmm that sounds like an O(N^3) problem." Interviewer: "Can you think of any way to do it in smaller big-O?" Me: "Not off the top of my head, no." For some reason that company insisted on o…

Three sum is what google uses for their video 'how to do a google code interview': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKu_SEDAykw

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

#120

Post by mixmastamyk » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

Nailed it. Despite the “shortage” (haha) Been underemployed for quite a while due to the these ugly practices. It’s very frustrating to have misguided folks in control of what you are allowed to work on and hellbent on wasting time.

One interview was for a Java Spring position, advice says study! But study what? I studied spring but interview was dozens of database questions instead. Could be CS, lang, framework, db, metrics, platform, OS level. No one knows all of these subjects completely.

Companies are so skittish that I recently could only get a two-week trial at low pay after crushing a call/homework. Hopefully they won’t be offended when I show up without sockhat and beard. :p