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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

#401

Post by stevenwoo »

ljw1001 wrote: post #331
sharemywin wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can just imagine a room full of top 10% engineers/architects...No we need to do it like this...Well, no did you think of this obscure use case... what about performance? I think...should we...fast forward a year later and the company went belly up because everyone was trying to be best and piss on each other to prove who was top...top. At least when middle managers do it they're only interested in who gets credit f…

I've worked at a company that generally hired extremely good engineers - much better than average and they were very successful because (1) doing that was actually important to the very hard problems they were solving, and (2) every other company in the world wasn't trying to take the same approach to hiring. Today, everyone thinks they should hire like google, even though they're building a mid-sized web or phone ap…

How did they interview these engineers to hire them in the first place?

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

#402

Post by [deleted] »

aquateen wrote: post #343
mindhash wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on a tangent, one way could be assign a number code to each alphabet. Add the numbers that occur in the strings. IF the sum matches, they are anagrams.

I don't see how the sum would be unique to a particular combination of letters.

[deleted]

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

#403

Post by collyw »

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…

Exactly. 95% + of the work out there is more about plumbing and a doesn't design to plumb together. On the rare occasion when I have had anything algorithimc to do I Google for similar problems.

The last time I had a proper algorithmic problem, I was in an academic institute and we had a guy researching algorithms so I asked him (though he didn't come up with mush). It was basically a variation the stable roommates problem. I came up with a solution - brute force plus a load of optimization and it worked well enough for the purpose.

When I get that crap in interviews some of the time I get the answer, some of the time I don't. Its pot luck. Its says very little about my skill for the jobs I am applying for. Ironically I was way better at answering those things 15 years ago when I was fairly crap at building reliable robust systems.

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

#404

Post by qaq »

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.

It's possibly OK (very strange but OK) to not know what ACID stands for. It's def. not ok to not know about Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability and more importantly why you need them if you are a DBA.

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

#405

Post by warrenm »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #98

I’d love to go into a technical interview where the homework beforehand is: “pick any of our blog posts and study it for discussion” and then you talk about it during the interview. You can drill down as much as you want on any dimension of whatever topic you choose. I think the choice of topic and how well the interviewee can discuss it would both be good, and distinguishable, signals.

Not only this, but it shows you're actually paying attention to the company

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

#406

Post by collyw »

pm90 wrote: post #143
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…

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…

I don't have a week to dedicate to crap like that. I do have 15 years of experience building stuff people actually need and i am reasonably good at it.

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

#407

Post by wpietri »

haskellandchill wrote: post #68
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 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…

I think it depends on how you're filtering the people who get to your interviews. If it's purely based on a resume screen, you can get a lot of people who can't code.

Personally, my first-line screen is a short answer (3-5 sentences) to a programming-related question. [1] For me, about 90% of applicants who pass that can also code. I like that better than a resume screen, as plenty of people who haven't officially been programmers are decent coders.

[1] Examples here under the "Join Us" section. https://web.archive.org/web/20151005181908/http://www.codefo...

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

#408

Post by ThrustVectoring »

sigstoat wrote: post #203
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…

> I'd suggest a widely-accepted professional certification could help a lot, like doctors and lawyers have with the medical board exam or the bar exam. "i passed the bar exam!" and nothing else doesn't get you a legal job you want. and your medical boards, if i recall correctly, just mean you're qualified to go be a slave, er, uh, resident, some place for a few years.

On the other hand, passing actuarial exams does get you in on the ground floor of that career.

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

#409

Post by dfjliasjg »

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?

Fucking LOL. I demand tests not to see whether you can write a for loop, my wife has an art degree and can do that. I demand tests to see if you bothered to comment your code, use version control, use tests, and actually put in some custom logic instead of boilerplate CRUD. There are so many people who fail those basic tasks, its unreal. Plus, programmers SUCK at interviews, so why even bother giving it any weight? Show me talent in the homework and I'll hire you.

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