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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

#421

Post by warrenm »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #40

I guess I don't understand why companies do this process. When I was hiring Senior engineers for Computer Vision and 3D rendering jobs my process was thus: 1. Post job and simultaneously search for engineers we thought were a good fit technically 2. Reach out to people I thought were qualified based on their specific previous work that was related to the job I was hiring for 3. Review submitted applications for relev…

>We never asked current salary because it wasn't relevant. I knew what I could pay and that's what was offered. If they asked for more and were worth it, then I would try and find money to make it happen, but generally it wasn't an option.

Thank you!

Some honesty and forthrightness for a change.

(It's something I put in a blog post (https://antipaucity.com/2013/03/25/what-to-offer-to-be-the-b...) 5+ years ago ...yet have only seen done once in my career)

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

#422

Post by raarts »

digitalsushi wrote: post #396
raarts wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? For any algorithmic question, if googling does not turn up a great answer, you would need to be a genius if you could come up with one on the spot.

We had a CS class at UNH, a state university, where we learned how to express the complexity of an algorithm and then how to refactor algorithms to be less complex, when possible. Although we do not do this type of work for most of our jobs, it is not a stretch to think that half of people with a CS degree might have at one point known how to do this on the spot.

Sure, but I would seriously question someone's Google fu, if it came to this.

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

#423

Post by kyberias »

lostcolony wrote: post #28
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.

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…

Do you really think that text-book question about ACID determines whether the applicant is a good DBA? I know something about databases but I couldn't remember all the letters.

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

#424

Post by dte22 »

gnulinux wrote: post #348
pkteison wrote: post #313

I have interviewed a lot of people with great resumes who literally could not fizzbuzz, or even write a simple for loop. And then if they can write the for loop, most fail when it's a nested for loop. And I don't mean got the syntax wrong - I mean just can't even start, on the simplest of tasks. I hate that I have to question whether candidates can code, but as near as I can tell, a lot of them truly can't. It leads…

After college, I was interviewing with the company I eventually ended up with. This was the second technical interview (and we eventually had a third). The very first question I was asked was to write a function that prints out a triangle like: . .. ... .... At the time I thought this was an attack to my honor. I literally felt terrible, and thought the interviewer was mocking me, for some reason. I also thought mayb…

no offset for the triangle, not too bad

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

#425

Post by Barjak »

komali2 wrote: post #216

>Total Jobs Applied For: 82 >Total Jobs Where You Got an HR Interview 25 >Total Jobs Where You Got a Technical Interview: 15 >Total Jobs Where You Got an Onsite Interview: 2 >Total Job Offers: 1 From a recruitment standpoint, this guy's "sales funnel" is remarkably efficient. I'm more used to seeing a ration of 100 applications > 10-15 phone calls > 5 onsites/technicals > 1 offer. Needless to say he blew the initial…

What percentage of the 100 applications include a personalized cover letter these days?

>It's a number's game. You must send a fuckload of resumes ...

So you recommend not bothering with personalized cover letters? At this point I'm really starting to see the sense in this.

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

#426

Post by znpy »

This writing seems to confirm something I've been suspecting for a while: the STEM shortage is a myth.

Think about it: how can companies be this picky if there really is a STEM shortage?

On a sidenote: I recently understood why meetups, events and networking is important: to interact as little as possible with HR.

I've recently a particularly bad experience where the HR person called me very early in the morning (without asking if it's a good time to talk) and then proceed with a third-degree interrogatory with all kind of questions, even reaching the point to interrupt me while I was articulating/motivating my answer in order to make another question.

That was so rude I got very angry after that call. That is not the way to handle a phone interview, that is not the way to handle a conversation of any kind.

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

#427

Post by taco_emoji »

logfromblammo wrote: post #336
spamizbad wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We set our in-house recruiter up with a coderpad question that screens candidates with a simple question: "Write a function that counts the number of vowels in a string" Candidates are allowed to run it multiple times and just have to produce a correct result within 10 minutes. It's not a trick question -- the test case in place makes sure you pay attention to case. Success rate for mid to senior devs? Only 60%.

In C#, the string object has some convenience in it: return inputString.Count( "eaoiuAIEOU".Contains ); Or if you want to solve two problems: static Regex VowelMatcher = new Regex( "[aeiou]", RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase ); ... return VowelMatcher.Matches( inputString ).Count; And if you want to be clever and snarky: return 2; // number of vowels in "a string"

The Count and Contains methods are not on string, they're both extension methods on IEnumerable, which string gets for free by implementing IEnumerable.

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

#428

Post by kybernetikos »

Balgair wrote: post #330
jandrewrogers wrote: post #137

To take a more nuanced view, I think there is an important distinction, frequently lost, between "can't code" -- which is all too common in practice -- and "can't easily code a stream-of-consciousness solution to a synthetic problem unrelated to anything I've ever built". Or its close cousin "can't easily code a toy solution to your toy problem since I've only worked on massively scalable versions of the same problem…

Hmm, maybe we should 'equalize' the playing field then: Give everyone something from left field that pretty much all people bomb, that'll see how quick they learn. Exp: You must code in an unfamiliar language (Fortran 1988, for example) and do something simple in it. At least then you'll know that people are all starting from scratch. Time it, make sure it doesn't last more than 2 hours, see how laughably slow we all…

I've worked somewhere where we used this approach for one of the 5 interview sections.

Even being upfront about our low expectations and providing very friendly and helpful people to pair and guide, it lead to record numbers flipping the table and stomping off premises before the completion of the interview.

I don't use this approach now, as I don't think its a good use of time (and I think an interview should be a positive experience even for those that fail), but it did provide, I believe, a fairly strong signal of the attitude with which a candidate approached learning new things (but not really anything else).

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

#429

Post by erikb »

Can't fully agree in quite a few points. I understand how the author got that feeling tho. Doing interviews is always eating away at one's confidence, no matter who you are.

1. no one believes anyone can actually code - I experience quite the opposite. People expect others to be able to code just because they are currently employed as software developer. That's not true at all. Sooo many people can't.

2. Coding interviews are not about findign the solution but about showing some skills, showing how you handle things under pressure, your ability to explain what you do etc.

3. homework assignments are not done in professional environments.

4. interviews matter more to you: I agree and really hate this. You need to give 120% before you even get to the point where you can choose what you want. And at this point you suddenly have 90% of the power and often not enough energy anymore to make anything good out of it.

5. And yes it's even part of the job of the company to NOT let you know why you weren't hired. Still, I think you often know after the interview how it seemed. Good feeling = chance, no good feeling = no chance, weird feeling = usually weird job as well.

PS: One side note. A senior coding position might feel age discriminatory because senior is for talented ~28 year olds to mediocre ~40 year olds. A 50 year old should be architect/manager or not switch jobs.

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

#430

Post by ngngngng »

dfjliasjg wrote: post #409

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. T…

Maybe it's still enough of an employers market for you to get away with this, but I have enough interviews that I don't have to put up with long homework assignments or horribly buggy leetcode tests. The company I most want to work at usually ends up being the one that doesn't use these annoying interview methods.
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