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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

#121

Post by minimaxir »

vorpalhex wrote: post #71
pg_bot wrote: post #6

Number 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.

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…

> 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.

Unfortunately, the current common argument from the hiring side is that GitHub profiles are not sufficient proof of skill since code can be copied (not fair) and GitHub projects bias toward people with extra free time (reasonable, but not enough to discount GitHubs completely IMO)

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

#122

Post by vthallam »

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…

Or you could do top 100 questions on leetcode or hackerrank and you would have solved the question in a minute. It's kinda sad that you could remember the top 100 solutions and clear interviews in almost all big tech companies.

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

#123

Post by calcifer »

ryandrake wrote: post #113
calcifer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 executi…

I understand and truly symphatize with stress the candidate is in, but someone who claims to be a "senior developer with 10 years experience" should be able to write that palindrome function in 30 whole minutes in any kind of stress scenario.

Because if I hire that person, they'll be in charge of critical production systems and will face much harder problems in much more stressful situations and if they can't handle the palindrome question, I have very little confidence they can handle the actual job.

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

#124

Post by Beltiras »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #49
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…

Haskell rather than Erlang.

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

#125

Post by ryandrake »

stevenwoo wrote: post #97
ryandrake wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a weird hiring market. 1. There are a lot of imposters out there applying for programming jobs who can't program, and 2. There are a lot of very talented programmers out there who are being rejected by overly picky companies. Both can be true, and I'd argue that both are true. I don't know what the solution is. Current interviewing methods don't seem to be solving the problem. I'd suggest a widely-accepted…

One problem with viewing the certification thing as a solution is people can then question - how do you know if you got the person who graduated at the top of their class versus someone who barely graduated? How are lawyers/doctors vetted beyond their certifications?

Make the bar for passing high enough such that even a person who scores the lowest passing score has demonstrated that he/she can at least code. A standard exam doesn't solve all problems with hiring, but it could at least help solve the very first "can this person even code at all?" screen that weeds out the total phonies.

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

#126

Post by AnimalMuppet »

> 1. The job search takes much, much longer than it used to.

Senior positions take longer than junior. There may be other factors in any individual case, but just as a general rule, the more experience you have, the longer it takes to get hired. This may relate to...

> 9. Age discrimination really exists.

In my experience, I haven't seen it. What I have seen is salary discrimination. I'm a pretty expensive guy. I've got 30 years of experience, I'm way more productive than younger people, and I want to be paid accordingly. A lot of companies don't want to pay that.

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

#127

Post by kearneyandy »

"I got all the way to the end, nailed everything perfectly and then never found out why I didn’t get it"

"I saw this repeatedly on jobs that I got all the way to the end point on."

"Total Jobs Where You Got an Onsite Interview: 2"

Interesting points, although I would probably want to see more data before drawing the same conclusions.

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

#128

Post by mrfusion »

yojex wrote: post #105
mrfusion wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm really glad that you and the parent posted these comments. As someone with pretty bad anxiety, this kind of thing prevents me from even going for interviews. And, unfortunately, after browsing this thread it seems that this possibility isn't even on most peoples' minds. FizzBuzz-style filters not only don't prove that someone can code, they don't disprove it either. I'm not sure what the answer is.

Honestly if it’s really bad I’d let them know before an interview. Just say something like.

I have social anxiety. It doesn’t interfere with my work in any way but I’m wondering if you could accommodate me in the interview by doing x y z.

It’s worth a try, right? I’ve thought about doing that.

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

#129

Post by warrenm »

ryandrake wrote: post #82
crdoconnor wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's such a weird hiring market. 1. There are a lot of imposters out there applying for programming jobs who can't program, and 2. There are a lot of very talented programmers out there who are being rejected by overly picky companies. Both can be true, and I'd argue that both are true. I don't know what the solution is. Current interviewing methods don't seem to be solving the problem. I'd suggest a widely-accepted…

And don't forget people being asked to do coding exercises for non-development jobs :|

(I've had that happen several places)

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

#130

Post by notyourloops »

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?

FizzBuzz? I find it hard to believe that FizzBuzz is being used as an actual screen, because realistically you'd have too many people passing.

If anything, the interviews I've been on have been four or five 45-minute whiteboard sessions, usually about data structures and algorithms or object oriented design.

Nowadays that also seems preceded by a homework assignment and a 3rd party coding quiz.

FizzBuzz would be refreshing.

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