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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

#181

Post by [deleted] »

vthallam wrote: post #122
phaedrus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#182

Post by hermitdev »

psyc wrote: post #81
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.

I've given coding interviews for 20 years, and I'd estimate 9/10 candidates have been competent whiteboard coders. I don't have any explanation for the extreme discrepancy between my experience, and the "hardly anyone can fizzbuzz" folks. Of course this colors how I treat people. I'm much more inclined to interview seniors conversationally and judge competence by the way they talk about work they have done. I have a…

Beyond fizzbuzz, whiteboard coding is rough. Better to put someone in front of an actual computer. Space is constrained, hard to make corrections, some people (such as myself) have crappy handwriting...

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

#183

Post by Bahamut »

eanzenberg wrote: post #115
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…

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 s…

That seems like a fairly arrogant response on your part - it's obvious that an interview is meant to gauge your technical capabilities/knowledge. Even if something is trivialized, the ability to solve certain types of problems can translate to other problem domains where you have to use the same core skills to solve other problems - parsing a file does not seem like an other worldly type of skill (it could even be an unstructured/loosely structured text file for example).

I think to some degree, a suspension of disbelief is reasonable for an interview, and it's not worthwhile to get tunnel vision on a particular problem asked. It's ok to point out that something is trivial with a particular widely used library or whatever, but if it is asked to implement something via first principles or whatever, it is a perfectly reasonable expectation to just do it for interview purposes as a simple mental exercise.

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

#184

Post by bulatb »

A: The talent shortage is just awful. Nobody can code.

B: How do you know?

A: They can't pass our test.

B: How do you know it works?

A: Because if they could code, they'd pass. Sometimes they pass, and even some of those can't code.

B: So nobody can pass your test.

A: That's right.

B: And even if they do, it doesn't mean they're good.

A: Yep.

B: It sounds like you've got neither recall nor precision. Don't you think the test could be wrong?

A: Nope! Everyone just sucks.

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

#185

Post by efields »

busterarm wrote: post #108
haskellandchill wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Ruby is hard to get a job in, so you are off to a rough start. Huh? Enterprise level companies are desperate for Ruby engineers to maintain large Rails apps and there still is a good amount of startups doing new work with it.

I'm a "Ruby engineer" but tend to avoid Rails teams because most of those large Rails apps are a giant pile of technical debt. They're looking to hire senior talent to clean up the mess but aren't willing to make the organizational commitments needed to make that effort succeed. No thanks. Edit: My 'favorite' experience was the few months of consulting work I did with a team building Rails apps to deal with medical r…

I'm in the midst of maintaining/fixing one of those and I find it a great opportunity if you A) want to learn outside your comfort zone, B) enjoy figuring out problems that aren't just technical (talking to people, design, organization), C) want to get out of a coding-grind lifestyle.

Our organizational structure isn't immutable, it just moves slowly. After about a year, my team's effort resulted in measurable improvements for both revenue and end-user experience.

If you're senior dev level and want more of a challenge that's not just throwing more code at the wall, these sorts of scenarios are something to seek out.

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

#186

Post by gimmeDatCheddar »

Welcome to a job market where there are hundreds of other qualified candidates competing for the same job. This is why government officials and company spokespersons peddled nonsense about there being a shortage in tech - it was to saturate the market with so much labor that they could start doing this and eventually paying less since they can just hire someone 5% better at 75% less pay.

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

#187

Post by Bahamut »

CryoLogic wrote: post #159
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…

I've had this question and replied with: const isPalindrome(str) { return str === str.split('').reverse().join(''); } And the post interview notes said bad performance on the isPalindrome() question since I didn't write out my own functions (interviewer did not mention to).

To be fair, if you wanted to do a performant implementation, this is probably a more expensive implementation. The expected response is generally for you to iterate over the string and construct a count map of how many times a character appears in a string, and then iterate over the keys of that object and have at most one odd number in the values of the count map.

The interviewer probably should have probed you about performance though if their intention was to judge you on that (they're both O(n) time complexity, but split, reverse, and join are generally more intensive).

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

#188

Post by pcunite »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #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 t…

Talk Frank Abagnale gave about his life

https://youtu.be/vsMydMDi3rI

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

#189

Post by s73v3r_ »

arca_vorago wrote: post #25
bg4 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also the reason why so many systems, at so many companies, are complete, utter shit.

I agree but I don't think it's fair to put it all on the incompetence of devs/engineers... in many cases it's mismanagement and the real problem is devs/engineers don't know how to talk to management to get to them see why $badpractice is bad. So because the devs don't have MBA's, and the MBA's don't talk well to technicals there is a huge culture gap in the average fortune 1000 workplace. I've seen the inside of com…

"in many cases it's mismanagement and the real problem is devs/engineers don't know how to talk to management to get to them see why $badpractice is bad."

I would say that's still management incompetence. They're paying all this money for experts in the field, and they still want to disregard their opinions.

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

#190

Post by s73v3r_ »

tboyd47 wrote: post #37
logfromblammo wrote: post #15

Every time I see another iteration of this kind of article, it screams out to me that we need some kind of worker's cartel that can enforce an embargo on companies that don't meet some minimal standard. Part of the problem is that companies keep getting more applicants than they can handle, no matter how hostile their interview process becomes.

I agree, but the problem is that unions notoriously favor the older, entrenched generations of a profession over the newcomers. Talk to people from NYC (a place with still much union influence) and you see a stark difference between the old folks and the younger folks in how they view workers' unions. Software development is already so heavily dependent on enthusiastic young people that I don't see how a union could…

"but the problem is that unions notoriously favor the older, entrenched generations of a profession over the newcomers."

There's nothing specific about a union that does this. The union is an extension of the will of it's members.

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