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

#261

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

ryanianian wrote: post #254

twodave wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the GH code is there, works, and is up to coding standards, why do you care about how the sausage was made? I'd look to see if the code is well-designed, organized, original, tested, etc. It's generally easy to see if the author of code knows how to decompose a problem into pieces. So..saying "we're looking for thought-process not the actual code" feels a bit disingenuous tbh. Now: If you care about being able to…

> If the GH code is there, works, and is up to coding standards, why do you care about how the sausage was made?

Perhaps because, like many developers on modern teams which eschew the older role distinction, the incumbent in the position being hired for will need to act in the role of a classic system analyst in defining specific requirements give a fuzzy business problem as well as the role of a grunt coder.

Also, the presence, functionality, and quality of code on GH does not establish it's provenance.

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

#262

Post by treis » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #118

treis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Not sure why the hostility.

His resume doesn't say he did auth. He used an open source library and made unspecified modifications to it. That's definitely something a junior level Dev could do.

"Or maybe it's part time". Exactly. A resume should give answers, not raise questions.

Expecting people to be charitable while reading resumes is unrealistic. A resume has to quickly demonstrate the applicants qualifications other wise it's trashed.

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

#263

Post by danpalmer » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

AndyNemmity wrote: post #210

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 did DB work forever never hearing ACID. I initially heard of it certainly from slashdot or hackernews, and it only ever ended up coming up due to not DB work, but DB analysis of tools. Once you start working on a particular database, and are working on all of the specific details of that db, how often does ACID come into things, really? It just doesn't.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know a lot about databases, but Atomiticy comes up a fair bit in the web apps I write, as does Consistency in terms of designing data models that can’t go wrong, or trying to encode domain structure into data models to use the Consistency guarantees that Postgres gives us. Isolation is pretty important in general, and easy to reason about from a web app perspective, with requests being isolated from each other at the database level, I rely on that all the time, and Durability doesn’t come up a load, but that’s because I haven’t had to do any sort of disaster recovery.

I don’t think it’s essential to know this, but I’d be surprised if a web dev interviewed with us and didn’t know at least the basic version I’ve given above.

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

#264

Post by rojobuffalo » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #220

rojobuffalo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't like take-home assignments. It's a one-sided time investment. If I'm asked to do one I say that I'm only prepared to put in 45 minutes on it. Now that I've done this a few times and subsequently been rejected after submitting, I'm leaning towards rejecting assignments altogether. It doesn't really serve me well in job searching but I feel strongly about it. It's a bad investment on my time and the assi…

Not a take home assignment, just prep material. Like saying, we will ask you about X, Y, and Z, here are some pointers. I would just worry the night before anyways, might as well put my anxiety at ease by prepping and building confidence.

Oh I see. Prep material would be great.

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

#265

Post by wnevets » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

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.

Exactly. The number of people who can't do basic development going into interviews pretending they can is kinda crazy.

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

#266

Post by slgeorge » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #230

Yeah, the entire HR process at most companies is so incredibly broken for technical candidates. One of the problems IMO is that HR doesn’t know shit about tech, and dev managers don’t know shit about HR. A dev manager who needs a person tells HR “I want to interview 10 people for this open job req” — which is likely just some bullets vaguely describing job responsibilities. HR, having very little idea what any of the…

> "HR doesn’t know shit about tech, and dev managers don’t know shit about HR"

This is the cause of a significant amount of waste, friction and general anger for both sides in my experience. Technologists are well-known for their TLA's, and HR teams have their own obfuscating discipline-specific terminology, assumptions and values.

The incentives for external recruiters are obviously a problem and even for internal recruiters they are mostly measured on seats filled rather than long-term retention or the candidates performance.

Hiring managers themselves are often extremely poor at describing or even understanding what it is they are trying to hire. They often struggle to provide clear and actionable feedback that can change the search.

Figuring out that collaboration is definitely worth while!

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

#267

Post by Clubber » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

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.

Yes, because nothing says top notch developer more than "I can memorize stuff and regurgitate it."

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

#268

Post by eanzenberg » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

always_good wrote: post #238

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…

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.

When I see someone doing something wrong or poorly I speak up and I speak out. Loading csv using vanilla python is in that boat. Present a good reason why it should be done in vanilla. Otherwise, I won't maintain your code as-is and will refactor it.

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

#269

Post by monksy » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

calcifer wrote: post #131

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…

> How often do you need to write palindrome functions for your job? That's like answering "how often do you need math?" to the question "what is 2+3?". It is an utterly, completely, stunningly trivial question that even a CS101 student on their first semester should be able to answer. > 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_s…

> (what does this pandas function do, how would you implement it yourself etc).

What are the downsides to using pandas? Is that worth brining in that large of a library for a matter like that.

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

#270

Post by d1zzy » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

s2g wrote: post #92

octorian wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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…

Volume. Huge volume. Google has a completely broken interview process, to the point where they pretty much brag about how ridiculous their false negative rate is, but they make up for it on volume. When people will throw themselves at you two or three times in hope of getting that lucky set of algorithm wankery questions that they can answer, then you will keep interviewing like that.

How do you define broken? It definitely sounds like it's working for Google so going by the "is the process working for the employer" definition it isn't broken.