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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

#461

Post by talmand »

d1zzy wrote: post #270
s2g wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> in hope of getting that lucky set of algorithm wankery questions that they can answer

If true, hiring based on luck seems broken to me. Like the joke of the hiring manager throwing away half the resumes and not hiring "unlucky" people.

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

#462

Post by boyter »

rojobuffalo wrote: post #212
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be better to have the interviewer provide take home context a few days before the interview that will be related to the coding problems during the interview? Somewhere between the take home coding problem and the whimsical toy problem solving by during the interview?

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…

Same. Now that I am on the other side I send out a short piece of code and ask the person to point out all the errors in it. There are about 20. It takes about 5-10 minutes of the candidates time and I have had a lot of success with it.

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

#463

Post by huherto »

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…

I believe I pretty much came out with this interview question. When I was 16 I learned programming from a BASIC book and there was a set of exercises like that. Years later (~ 1994?) when I first started hiring software engineers I noticed that many didn't even know how to do for loops. So I remembered these and started using them for the initial screening. Over the years I have worked with many people and I know many of them adopted these.

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

#464

Post by nopacience »

"That’s almost two months start to finish! And today that job remains on the company’s web site – they still haven’t hired anyone."

That probably shows HR is just "working" and doing interviews. Not necessarily to hire anyone.. they might just be gathering data. Maybe harvesting the people available on the market. Checking if you are up to doing homework and not getting paid. Checking what your salary is. Telling you make some ranking challenges. Building a profile about you.

Your profile might get a price-tag and shared on the HR black market. I suspect there are even black lists by segment shared on some HR black markets.

Then, there is also a big mafia/network that makes people only hire friends, recommended or known persons.

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

#465

Post by maxk42 »

I'll throw it out there that I think coding boot camps are partly responsible for this situation. Yes, there were several very reputable ones, but there were also a lot of shady joints operating as little more than diploma mills. They were churning out thousands of unqualified candidates and as a senior developer in charge of hiring it suddenly became apparent that the quality of these candidates was much lower than I was used to. When they couldn't get jobs easily they may have began seeking employment at lower wages and it looks like the wages have definitely been dropping industry-wide in my location.

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

#466

Post by warrenm »

LandR wrote: post #4
golergka wrote: post #2

> When did an entire industry of people get pre-judged as lying? That's the kind of thing that happens when people lie. Everybody who's ever hired engineers knows from experience that a simple Fizzbuzz test is still, unfortunately, a very usable candidate filter. A lot of candidates with years of real work experience simply cannot write code. How else can we find this out?

> A lot of candidates with years of real work experience simply cannot write code. How else can we find this out? So true, sadly.

That's because 95% of software development IS NOT CODING

It's thinking, puzzling, chewing over problems, solving political infighting between customers, management, and the frameworks in use

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

#467

Post by michaelkeenan »

glangdale wrote: post #258
falcolas wrote: post #223

I have a theory of why most of these changes in the job hunt came about: people became afraid of firing. I further theorize that this is an indirect consequence of primarily technical folks filling management roles. How does a fear of firing impact hiring procedures? If you are afraid of firing, you're afraid that you won't be able to get rid of a toxic individual; that a single individual will act as a poison to the…

Don't know why you're getting downvoted. Much of the language I get from bigco people about why they are so selective is exactly this; it's almost a confession that once in, they are very bad at managing performance.

Downvotes might be from CMV-norm people[1] thinking "that's bullshit" is rude/inflammatory and unfit for HN.

[1] https://changemyview.net/2018/03/28/thats-bullshit-rude-enou...

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

#468

Post by Balgair »

kybernetikos wrote: post #428
Balgair wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Wow, alright, this is exactly what I was thinking. The 'novel coding' test was just one test, that it was forewarned to be laughably hard, and that you all were friendly about it. I really do want to know more about how this all went as I thought this would be a really good way to interview coders, but unfortunately I am totally wrong. I want to know why my thoughts are totally off-base.

Really, please, tell us more!

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

#469

Post by falcolas »

Retric wrote: post #449
falcolas wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downvotes are probably because I've implicitly called out individuals who believe in - have perhaps even published materials encouraging - the "missing out on 99 good hires is better than making one bad hire" philosophy. I've also explicitly called out the FAANG hiring practices, which are frequently held up as the best practices in the industry by those doing the hiring. After all, who wants to be even partially…

It's in no way a fear of firing someone that's little easy. The fear is the weeks/months of issues before someone is fired. Further, many people that are part of the process will be working with this person, but not be able to fire them.

Is there also a fear of three people doing the work of four for weeks/months since there's the possibility someone could be a bad hire?

Is there not also a fear that an overworked person will become toxic?

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

#470

Post by khedoros1 »

woolvalley wrote: post #441
falcolas wrote: post #223

I have a theory of why most of these changes in the job hunt came about: people became afraid of firing. I further theorize that this is an indirect consequence of primarily technical folks filling management roles. How does a fear of firing impact hiring procedures? If you are afraid of firing, you're afraid that you won't be able to get rid of a toxic individual; that a single individual will act as a poison to the…

Firing a person on a work visa is a seriously dick move, especially if they are from china or India, where the waiting lines for a green card is 3-10+ years.

If they're literally incompetent or toxic (i.e. "bad"), it's obviously better to find that out during the interview process and not hire them in the first place. The 10 "potential candidates" don't include anyone that the interview process detected as bad.

Interviews are imperfect, and damaging candidates will slip through the cracks. Are you seriously suggesting that a business should decide not to fire someone based on their immigration status, rather than their performance and integration with the team?

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