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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

#581

Post by alacombe »

amorphid wrote: post #417
taco_emoji wrote: post #390

> Number 6: Outsourced Hiring Assessment Services Are Very Much in Vogue I ran into this a few years ago. I bombed hard when they asked me some specific terminology question about the stages of the ASP.NET request lifecycle. I believe I just said "I have no idea" and the call was over shortly after that. It was frustrating--why are they hiring based on esoteric trivia instead of general programming skill? This assess…

I've done 99.999% of my development on a Mac. I took a coding quiz a few years ago that asked me where I could find the "ruby" executable on Windows.

"In the PATH."

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

#582

Post by stevenwoo »

komali2 wrote: post #536
Barjak wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can put together a customized, good looking and genuine cover letter within 5 minutes + another 5 minutes of research that was already happening to determine if I wanted to apply. You should always send a cover letter because it can't hurt, can only help, and therefore game theory or some shit.

Started looking a couple of weeks ago and it's hard to not get some emotional investment (if that's the right phrase) after putting some effort into a cover letter. That's even with the knowledge that one is likely to be rejected for most applications - so it feels like I'm draining some capital for each of them.

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

#583

Post by alacombe »

kenoyer130 wrote: post #23

Number 1: I think this is due to specializing in Ruby on Rails which is falling out of favor? Or your city location? I know in my location the average job hunt is 2 weeks. Number 2: As someone that interviews people alot, this is cuz MANY people who apply CANNOT code, no matter what their resume says. We have had people leave and never come back during our console app on site test (read in a text file and print out i…

> Many times a candidate regardless of age is stuck in one tech

Because companies themselves don't understand that the full stack developer, from kernel work to UI is a real thing, ie. you can easily transfer competence from one tech to the other.

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

#584

Post by humanrebar »

cpeterso wrote: post #504
Balgair wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like to pose technical problems that can scale to the candidate's level of experience. If I sense I'm hitting the candidate's comfort level, I can back off. Otherwise, I can take the problem even deeper with more technical questions. Either way the candidate still has a positive experience.

This is my approach as well. Ask really easy questions and get more complicated as they do well. I also try to increase difficulty in line with the strengths espoused on their resumes. If they are fantastic with databases, I might make sure the problem can be solved well with a database oriented solution.

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

#585

Post by lliamander »

jonathankoren wrote: post #546
lliamander wrote: post #500

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. 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…

> Motives are mostly irrelevant

They are relevant enough that the prior poster felt the need to smear them.

> if the effect is the same

The claimed effect is, at this point, purely hypothetical and indeed runs contrary to my experience.

> An easy switch would be to convert take homes to onsite work.

Generally speaking, an onsite task like you describe seems like a reasonable choice for a company to make. However, this strikes me as worse for the affected groups that reaperducer was concerned about:

- It requires scheduling an even larger fixed block of time outside one's normal job/life responsibilities. A take-home assignment at least allows for flexibility for when you work on it. It strikes me that time-poor candidates would appreciate the flexibility.

- It would no longer be a "blind audition". When I've reviewed take-home assignments, I don't know anything about the candidate except that the code. It strikes me as a good way to resist unconscious bias from seeping in.

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

#586

Post by alacombe »

raarts wrote: post #319

> Coding Tests Can Trip Up Even Good Engineers I recently took the first one ever in my career (in my late fifties). People tell me they think I'm an excellent programmer, but I did awfully bad. Why? - it was my first time - in daily life I switch between many languages, devops, meetings, and research. It always takes me some time to ramp up, especially on syntax: coming from Elixir, switching to Javascript: how does…

Welcome to the club...

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

#587

Post by Apocryphon »

warrenm wrote: post #144
annexrichmond wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and then some interviewers have the nerve to ask, "have you seen this question before?"

As bad as coding interviews are, at least they're better than riddle/lateral-thinking questions

Those are at least a little fun, though.

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

#588

Post by taurath »

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…

Blind audition is BS, because you're never ever comparing apples to apples, and frequently because the problem set is little like how you actually work. If the end goal is to find someone who can do the work well, be a pleasure to work with, and contribute to your organization or company in a meaningful way, we have not optimized for that. We've optimized to hire kids out of college who are experienced taking tests, or for people who have worked on the exact same stack you've worked on.

You will never be unbiased in a hiring process, because the bar you set is not universal, and always be biased in some way. Being "as blind as possible" isn't the right metric, and we shouldn't hire based on it.

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

#589

Post by always_good »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #380
always_good wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your refusal exposed you as someone with a hubris that's hard to work with. Who doubles down and refuses to budge. That you couldn't yield on such a trivial, manufactured matter would make me wonder how you respond in a team environment on real matters in the face of adversity.

CSV is really fucking hard to parse. There's tons of edge cases. "I'd just use a well-known, well-tested library" is a very valid answer. One of my go-to questions is "sort this array", and if the candidate types `Arrays.sort(input)` they get bonus points, because it shows they have useful knowledge of the language they'll be writing in.

Here's how their scenario would actually play out:

    > I took my sunglasses off, looked him dead in the eye,
    > and said "Why? Why write your own method in
    > a vanilla language? Give me a good reason."
Interviewer: "To see how you might approach it."

It's a synthetic interview question. Why does it suddenly need to be a production-ready CSV parser?

We don't have enough information to say whether these are bad interview questions, and it's really not the point.

Maybe the interviewer just wanted to see if you'd use good fd hygiene (`with open('file.txt') as f:`) and that you can stub out some toy parser code and speak of it intelligently. And that you wouldn't throw a fit when asked to write some code that a library like `npm install fizzbuzz` can already solve.

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

#590

Post by quickben »

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.

Had few jobs in low level system codebases in the millions of locs. I've had 9 months probation periods.
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