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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

#541

Post by ljw1001 »

warrenm wrote: post #387
pnathan wrote: post #139

I suspect OP is in a space both professionally and physically where the job market is poor and a ton of cruddy candidates show up. I relate though, although I'm in Seattle area, which is a great place - I interview really badly. I strongly agree that hoops are getting added. However, I have found that great companies do compete on hiring process. Microsoft remains the Gold Standard for me in how fast they turnaround…

> Every company believes they are snowflakes. And yet...on average, companies are "average"

If only. Many companies hiring this way are Paul Graham's "mosquitos" whose role in the tech ecosystem is to have a one in 10 (or 100) chance of making it big, and are largely running on a cocktail of delusions and hype.

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

#542

Post by reinhardt »

tuukkah wrote: post #412
tylerhou wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works if you assign prime numbers to each letter and multiply instead. So a=2, b=3, etc.

To get decent anagram lengths and complexity, implement the numbers as a dict of repetitions of primes, and implement the multiplication by summing the repetitions. ;-)

In which case you can just compare the dicts without performing the multiplication (which happens to be the costliest part for arbitrary-precision integers).

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

#543

Post by michaelchisari »

ModernMech wrote: post #488
thegayngler wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most engineers would not hire themselves. That has been apparent to me for awhile now. I’m not sure why they expect people to be to be better than they were when they were hired. I don’t expect engineers to be better than me. I have but one qualification. Can they do the job? Are they strong enough that I can guide them into the position I need them at if it is required. So much focus has been put on 10x this and hig…

> Companies waste lots of engineering talent and company money looking for 10x when 10x is mostly situational in nature. ... In one scene the engineers are not producing. Change the scene and now they are 10x I can relate to this. I have pretty good resume - good schools, advanced degree, impressive sounding projects, a long list of publications. My track-record suggests I am at least a 3x engineer. So when I get int…

Forget syntax bad. Forget algorithms bad.

I regularly look things like that up. I am a builder and a problem solver, not a reference manual.

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

#544

Post by monksy »

jcadam wrote: post #296
monksy wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually sounds like a very reasonable senario to not do so well in. The problem that I have with those problems is, they always assume it's easy to answer after seeing the solution. But if you're working on them for the first time, it's a terrible environment. The minute that they stop asking you, as the canidate, are on a timeline to finish. (Also, to finish as well) The answer to that item would be: (with sca…

My personal opinion on what a senior dev interview should be is: open with a fizzbuzz-level 'bozo filter' coding question, then step away from the whiteboard and spend the rest of the interview speaking to each other like normal, functional adults.

I actually implemented fizzbuzz in Scala recently.. It's a lot easier to do it in a language that has good pattern matching. Doing that in c++/Java is pretty annoying

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

#545

Post by andai »

ljw1001 wrote: post #516
reinhardt wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually agree with each other. You're saying "it would be a dream scenario if the next 10 programmers I hire were all superior to me"; it's an ideal outcome, even if unlikely. The parent's "I don’t expect engineers to be better than me" merely points out the unlikeliness, you point out the desirability.

When I was at one company (later acquired by Google), one of the developers created a model to show just how unlikely it was that every new hire would continue to raise the average level of competence for the team as a whole (as our hiring traditions espoused). After years of hiring very good programmers, it just wasn't going to be possible to hire many more who could pass that test.

Could you elaborate on the hiring process? Was it calibrated to hire people more competent than X% of the current engineers?

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

#546

Post by jonathankoren »

lliamander wrote: post #500
reaperducer wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take-home assignments are a great way to filter out women, the sick, and the poor, but make it look totally above board. "The IT industry is committed to increasing the number of women engineers. But if they're too busy caring for their children to spend six hours doing our silly test, that's their fault for being women. We are forced to hire 20-something white males who have nothing better to do with their time."

> Take-home assignments are a great way to filter out women, the sick, and the poor, but make it look totally above board. I hope your not impugning the motives of those who issue take-home assignments. Existing practices for hiring are objectively bad at selecting qualified candidates, and most people are just trying to do better. There is some evidence that take-home assignments are an improvement above the norm. A…

Motives are mostly irrelevant, if the effect is the same.

An easy switch would be to convert take homes to onsite work. One of the more recent interviews I had consisted of putting me in a room with some data and a stub of code and asked me to fill in the stub over a few hours. Every so often, they’d come by and ask if there were any problems. (More frequently at first, and then later less frequently.)

It’s basically the same, but it’s timeboxed and well defined with enough back and forth, to not feel like they’re just throwing a problem over the wall to you.

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

#547

Post by [deleted] »

bmomb wrote: post #400
twodave wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't bad. I've used one similar: "Write a function that reverses the words in a (string) sentence" i.e. (x) => x.split(' ').reverse().join(' ');

Just a little trivia; The fastest way to reverse a string is in JS is: function reverse(s) { var o = []; for (var i = 0, len = s.length; i

[deleted]

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

#548

Post by monksy »

enedil wrote: post #295
monksy wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually sounds like a very reasonable senario to not do so well in. The problem that I have with those problems is, they always assume it's easy to answer after seeing the solution. But if you're working on them for the first time, it's a terrible environment. The minute that they stop asking you, as the canidate, are on a timeline to finish. (Also, to finish as well) The answer to that item would be: (with sca…

So is it actually O(n^2)? Because that is a solution that can be implemented.

That all depends on the sliding function and if it stores in a buffer. (If it does this is o n)

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

#549

Post by alxndr »

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…

What about a completely untimed take-home project?

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

#550

Post by tintor »

mywittyname wrote: post #474
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…

> Do you have 10 positions and 10 potential candidates? Hire all 10 folks, and fire the one bad person; your company will be better off for the decision. Much better off than it would be if you instead overwork your existing team because you haven't found your unicorn hires yet. Even if you hire two do-nothings and a negative-performing person (consumes half an FTE's day in questions), you still end up with 6.5 produ…

"For negative performing people, I usually give them something kind of busy-work that doesn't involve the rest of the team."

Why waste time? Why not just fire them?

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