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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

#571

Post by kevan »

sharemywin wrote: post #247
pm90 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For all the claims of companies that they only hire the "top 10%" or whatever of engineers, the interview process is often optimized to the benefit of the median engineer. This really seems out of necessity. There are going to be a lot more qualified median engineers rather than superstar coders, so it makes sense to optimize your hiring pipeline to assess these folks. In my experience, most of the "top 10%" hires…

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…

Top 10% engineers aren't just really good at tech, they're really good at working productively in team environments and delivering products.

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

#572

Post by dv_dt »

thegayngler wrote: post #365
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…

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…

It has to do with companies looking for people to be off the shelf cogs/resources instead of having a plan for training & growth.

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

#573

Post by alacombe »

pascalxus wrote: post #147

It's official. We now definitely have a vast oversupply of engineering talent available in the marketplace. This post is a great report and a must read of all engineers.

Not necessarily, if there is one constant in the jobs I've been in is that even if we've got the funds we're pretty much constantly under staffed (ie. overloaded). HR is the broken link.

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

#574

Post by ng12 »

znpy wrote: post #426

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 (wit…

> how can companies be this picky if there really is a STEM shortage?

Honestly I think it's because mediocre engineers are more trouble than they're worth. We're collectively not good enough at building software to adopt a "warm body" approach.

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

#575

Post by ahtu123 »

codingdave wrote: post #211
phaedrus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once got knocked out of the running by a whiteboard-coding interview question that went something like "How would you find all triples from a list of a million integers, where the first two numbers add up to the third?" I said, "Hmmm that sounds like an O(N^3) problem." Interviewer: "Can you think of any way to do it in smaller big-O?" Me: "Not off the top of my head, no." For some reason that company insisted on o…

>"Not off the top of my head, no." They were probably looking for the answer of, "Lets talk through it and figure out a better answer". Coders are often under a mistaken impression that interviewers care about your answer. They don't. They care about how you approach it, how you think through it, what you do when challenged, etc. So from their perspective, they asked you to try harder on a problem, and you just said,…

> Coders are often under a mistaken impression that interviewers care about your answer. They don't.

Huge asterisk that as long as you arrive to the correct solution with minimal help. I've had plenty of algo/ds interviews and it seems like needing help to see the trick in the question pretty much means you're out.

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

#576

Post by sp527 »

ljw1001 wrote: post #528
jasode wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I recall one of my friends, when I was at Google, sending me a screenshot of code written by Jeff Dean with an obvious bug. Jeff is, of course, extraordinary, but I wonder how many companies might have passed on him if he submitted that code in an interview setting.

This anecdote made my day. Thank you for helping assuage my Imposter Syndrome.

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

#577

Post by yodsanklai »

mratzloff wrote: post #515
yodsanklai wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently interviewed at a big tech company (phone interview). I spent quite some time practicing on leetcode (completed at least 150 problems). During the interview, it took me a few minutes of thinking before completing the assignments with what I think was the expected solution. We discussed the complexity and a few possible variations. The interview sounded satisfied and I really had the feeling that I had naile…

I wonder if my age is an issue (40+) The answer to that is almost always yes.

I really wonder how age is taken into account. If it were really an issue, they could have rejected my application from the start and not bother with an interview.

Maybe the interviewer was biased and led to think I was "out of practice" because he knew I was on the older side. But I'll give them the benefice of the doubt. I believe it's a competitive position and I simply wasn't in the right percentile to qualify.

Now, would my former self 20 years ago be more competitive for this kind of interviews? slightly faster perhaps, but I don't feel I'm at a disadvantage compared to younger candidates.

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

#578

Post by TheCoelacanth »

sharemywin wrote: post #247
pm90 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For all the claims of companies that they only hire the "top 10%" or whatever of engineers, the interview process is often optimized to the benefit of the median engineer. This really seems out of necessity. There are going to be a lot more qualified median engineers rather than superstar coders, so it makes sense to optimize your hiring pipeline to assess these folks. In my experience, most of the "top 10%" hires…

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…

Someone being smart does not mean they are going to be an architecture astronaut or that they will be unable to cooperate with other people (especially with people who are roughly as smart).

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

#579

Post by alacombe »

fuzzygroup wrote: post #280
RomanPushkin wrote: post #273

Interesting read. So here is what I've learned if you wanna keep on writing code and stay competitive: * You'll be discriminated the older you get. Make yourself ready: * Career and big names is important. Companies wanna hire ex-googlers. Have Google on your resume. It's better to work in BigCorp for 10 years rather than being contractor for 10 years. * Improve your interview skills. For engineer it's theoretical co…

Hi, You will absolutely be discriminated against the older you get. Your observation on being a contractor for too long is likely on point (I was).

Once a contractor, always a contractor. Especially if you remote. You'll get the condescending "can you work 9 to 5 in a cubicle ?".

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

#580

Post by taurath »

iamcasen wrote: post #226
larrik wrote: post #30

I've been involved in hiring senior engineers for a while now, and here's a few counterpoints: 1) Ruby is hard to get a job in, so you are off to a rough start. 2) A lot of people with lots of experience actually can't code for crap. Do you know how many python developers I see that don't know the difference between a tuple and list? Like, how could you be a real dev if you never even wondered why sometimes you use […

Point number 2 doesn't really land for me. I can see how a dev of 10 years might never have needed to think about tuples, depending on what code she was responsible for. Some folks aren't really curious about deep internals, they care more about the bigger picture. Scalability, system maintainability, ease of deployment, monitoring, ease of iteration, etc. If pressed, they can dig in and understand the internals, but…

Some folks are curious and have learned about deep internals, but after 10 years of actually producing production code and never using them, expecting them to pull it out in a 35 minute "technical" interview is the problem.

If your company hires based on a technical interview that everyone says is not representative of the work that is done, you are not hiring right.

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