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

#561

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

zepolen wrote: post #552

ModernMech wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

6 months? That's terrible. Most engineers can be productive in a month. The 3x engineers take half that.

[deleted]

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

#562

Post by spirodonfl » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 10:50 PM UTC

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…

Geez I could not agree more. Not only has it, overall, been a bad investment of time (for myself and others I know around me in the field) but so many companies are unclear in what they're looking for in that test to begin with.

I wrote a thing about it and I got someone who responded to me with a rather scathing rebuttal. I don't know, it's very conflicting.

Post in case you're interested: https://dev.to/spirodonfl/should-i-accept-coding-challenges-...

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

#563

Post by AnimalMuppet » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

michaelchisari wrote: post #543

ModernMech wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"I'm not a reference manual." I'm going try to remember that to use in an interview some time when I don't know something off the top of my head, and they get in my face for it.

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

#564

Post by sudouser » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 10:54 PM UTC

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…

Battle Code Royale

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

#565

Post by hw89y24y89 » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 10:54 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #496

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…

>I don’t expect engineers to be better than me. I respect your opinion but I find this strategy very strange. (Or maybe I don't exactly understand what you're saying.) In my view, it would be a dream scenario if the next 10 programmers I hire were all superior to me . If I was the worst programmer on the team, that would be an ideal outcome. Yes, I've been programming for 30+ years but I'm also self-aware of my limit…

Java in 1996 was version 1! Doesn't necessarily say much about Larry'd code-foo :)

Jokes aside; I agree with the advice of hiring people smarter than you in the domains where you won't be paying attention should the company actually take off.

If you're looking to be a founder/CEO level type, doesn't seem to matter what your skill in Java and OOP are, yes? No need to be a water walker.

That's the "genius" of management; they sell an idea and get someone else to do the work.

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

#566

Post by ojbyrne » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 10:55 PM UTC

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.

You can give them plenty of signals that it's time to look for a new job before you fire them.

Plus now there is a 60 day grace period for H-1Bs to try and find a new job.

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

#567

Post by jenscow » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 11:02 PM UTC

zumu wrote: post #135

brandall10 wrote: post #39

Been coding professionally since '99 - C/C++/C# until 2012, then Rails/React/Angular over the past 6 years. I guesstimate I've been on some 50 interviews. If anything I feel that things have gotten better, although this may be a difference between my former enterprise Windows-stack life vs. open source tech life. The main differences I see are: - Take homes are more prevalent... but I recall only one which has taken…

> I typically red-flag potential employers who doesn't sufficiently validate the skillset of potential hires. I'm beginning to take this to heart.

It's a positive signal of the quality of code + team.

I sometimes ask if the rest of the team have taken this test (I was once told I was the first, and I'm the replacement)

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

#568

Post by smsm42 » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 11:02 PM UTC

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…

Forgetting syntax shouldn't be a problem. That's what manuals are for. Of course, if you are applying for a Java programmer job and you don't know the first thing about how Java program looks like, it's a no-no. But if you forgot some detail about how to write some obscure construct - that's what manuals and SO are for.

6 months to get into things is kinda long though. Unless it's super complex things, it should be less. Are you sure you are not exaggerating?

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

#569

Post by trevor-e » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 11:05 PM UTC

leongrande wrote: post #432

jcadam wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the same thing happen to me. Simple problem: find out if two strings are anagrams of each other. My immediate solution: Sort the two strings and then compare them: (defn anagrams? [x y] (= (sort x) (sort y))) or some such. I was fortunate in that they didn't make me implement the sort (because it's been a long time for me) :) "Ok, what's the efficiency of that solution?" "Well, assuming the library sort functions…

You need not to sort the strings. Create a vector with indices he ascii codes, incrementing for the first string and decrementing the count for the second, and keep a count of the number of chars, if you get a negative number exit false, else if the count of chars is zero then each one is an anagram of the other. (n+m+128) operations n and m are the length of both strings and 128 for creating the vector

Interviewer: "OK, how about with a unicode string?"

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

#570

Post by spirodonfl » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 11:06 PM UTC

geebee wrote: post #31

Thank you for writing this post. It was informative. A few comments from a fellow software developer who is approaching 50... I don't think the coding test isn't there because people think you're lying, it's there because we have no industry wide, respected entrance exam. Actuarial interviews don't (to my knowledge) contain a whiteboard vector calculus exam, but this isn't because people just sort of believe actuarie…

I like the idea of a proper and respected exam of some kind to test you on a variety of skills that are actually valuable in general and in specific.

I've attempted to gather data from colleagues around me but the data is limited. Posting online doesn't get much attention either. But I am trying to gather enough data to see if it would even be possible to create such an exam.

If a bunch of developers took a few minutes of their time to answer questions regarding what kinds of things should go into an exam and why (or heck, even a better teaching curriculum than what we have now) I think we could easily come up with something pretty awesome.

But, again, gathering that kind of attention and asking developers to provide you with insight is hard.

I'd love to tackle it if others were willing to help.