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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

#231

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#232

Post by Chyzwar »

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…

Requiters are lovely. These kind people are looking day and night to send me some leads that I mostly ignore. They are basically doing free work for me.

I am like the flower of lotus - waiting. When there is anything interesting I can jump ships using requiter network to help with the interview. After my first job, I never had the need to search personally.

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

#233

Post by komali2 »

>When did an entire industry of people get pre-judged as lying? Don’t we exist in a country where the default assumption is innocence not guilt?

Well... a ton of graduates can't code. Interviewers are constantly struggling with people that can't fizz buzz. Hence fizz buzz's existence.

You don't see it until you post and are responsible for a job ad, which is never for most engineers, and once every year or two for those that do have to get involved in the process.

Lord forbid it's an entry level, you'll get tons of great-on-paper compsci kids that never actually pinned down a programming language and aren't even sure how to hello world out of a c# application (pro-tip, just fucking use python or javascript lol). For frontend, bootcamp kids usually come out on top in this scene, because the camps are specifically prepared for exactly this problem (considering it's their niche - the very reason they exist).

(I've commented on another aspect of the article, but it was long enough that I felt I should break this thought into another comment)

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

#234

Post by eanzenberg »

cortesoft wrote: post #149
eanzenberg wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So what is the interviewer supposed to do to find out if you can code? They want to give you a simple, straightforward task to see how you code. Of course, every simple, straightforward task is going to have an existing tool to do the job, but they aren't looking for a solution to parsing CSV, they are looking to see you code. They can't ask you a complicated problem, because they don't have the time (nor do you) to…

I think that is the point. If your business relies on importing csvs that cannot be imported with pandas then explain that, explain the edge cases where pandas has failed, and I will understand. If your business relies on having the best fucking palindrome product then that becomes super relevant.

They can definitely ask a complicated problem. On-sites are 4 hours long these days.

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

#235

Post by bg4 »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #189
arca_vorago wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experiences, non-technical managers tend not to trust software engineers. This is partly due to a lack of true professional credential for software developers and a lack of their own technical chops to call out any bullshit.

To put it simply, they don't feel comfortable saying: "Well... you're the Doctor".

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

#236

Post by jarsin »

hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #174
pm90 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not just testing your analytical skills but also, I believe, your ability to self-study for something, even as "annoying" as algorithmic coding problems. I kinda agree with you that it doesn't make sense much of the time if you have to specifically prepare for the coding interview; stuff you may never use in your job. But its not a lot of stuff: I bit the bullet and spent some time solving those questions an…

How is proving self study ability relevant to a job? Doesn't my resume of wildly varying projects and my ability to competently talk about them prove that? It sounds to me like a way to weed out pesky applicants who have families or who are simply older.

Dude stop being logical. This is software development hiring.

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

#238

Post by always_good »

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…

Your refusal exposed you as someone with a hubris that's hard to work with. Who doubles down and refuses to budge.

That you couldn't yield on such a trivial, manufactured matter would make me wonder how you respond in a team environment on real matters in the face of adversity.

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

#239

Post by bigtunacan »

autokad wrote: post #146
vthallam wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

its kinda sad you think professionals should memorize useless tricks that dont generalize to the profession in order to be considered for a job. The skill takes a long time to practice, and quickly evaporates once you stop doing it. Yet none of our work is anything like that. a more real world situation is reading documentation or SO for the function concat_ws that will turn an array column to a concatenated string.…

I didn't take the parent's post the same way. The situation is more that if you do leetcode or hackerrank then you pass the interview. So once again the interview process has failed; instead of identifying good candidates you identify candidates that do hackerrank in their free time.

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

#240

Post by eropple »

Jedi72 wrote: post #74
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.

Startups that once would be be Ruby shops are moving to Elixir in droves

My experience is that that's not true. A good part of my business is knowing the startup scene in general and Boston specifically; locally, I'm aware of...well, one company founded in the last five years that used Erlang or Elixir when the alternative was Ruby. (I'm only aware of three overall that use Erlang or Elixir at all. And that's kind of a shame because I really like Elixir.)

What substantive evidence do you have of this shift?

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