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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

#611

Post by modbait »

warrenm wrote: post #416
kearneyandy wrote: post #127

"I got all the way to the end, nailed everything perfectly and then never found out why I didn’t get it" "I saw this repeatedly on jobs that I got all the way to the end point on." "Total Jobs Where You Got an Onsite Interview: 2" Interesting points, although I would probably want to see more data before drawing the same conclusions.

You should never expect to find out why you didn't get hired somewhere. But the answer is always one of the following: - someone else was a better fit (tech, culture, attitude, etc) - you're actually truly incompetent - the interviewers are morons 99% of the time, it's that someone else was a better fit.

Unless you're astoundingly good, if companies are interviewing around N candidates for each position, you should expect a hit rate of around 1/N. Doing significantly better pretty much requires all three of those to be simultaneously false.

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

#612

Post by dbg31415 »

> Age discrimination really exists.

Avoid age discrimination by screeners by limiting your resume to the last 10 years and taking the dates off when you graduated.

The last 5-7 years is more than enough in most cases... when I look at a resume with jobs going back to the 90s... it's just painful. Nobody cares what you were doing past your last job. Add 1-2 more jobs before that if you really want to give me background, but as someone who goes through a lot of resumes I wish they were capped at 1-page, and 3 past jobs.

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

#613

Post by smsm42 »

erikb wrote: post #429

Can't fully agree in quite a few points. I understand how the author got that feeling tho. Doing interviews is always eating away at one's confidence, no matter who you are. 1. no one believes anyone can actually code - I experience quite the opposite. People expect others to be able to code just because they are currently employed as software developer. That's not true at all. Sooo many people can't. 2. Coding inter…

> A 50 year old should be architect/manager or not switch jobs.

Why? What's wrong with coding when you're 50 if you like doing it? That sounds like completely prejudiced and baseless claim.

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

#614

Post by bsder »

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…

> 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.

You also have to be careful when in the interview you throw this. A bad hit like this can throw a candidate off for the rest of the interview even if they are quite acceptable.

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

#615

Post by YokoZar »

komali2 wrote: post #386
bulatb wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Story time! I've failed a FizzBuzz. While failing interviews is basically my superpower, I think my git repositories, college graders, previous and subsequent employers, coworkers and clients might be somewhat shocked to learn that all that code was written by a guy who "couldn't code" at all. (The autograders and CI accepting all that non-code must have been exceptionally buggy.) But still, I failed the test. I told…

Putting yourself in the shoes of the company interviewing you: If you collapsed into a puddle of goo under pressure, to the point where you were incapable of performing a task "you could do in your sleep," why are you still a good choice to hire?

Because the day to day job is nowhere near as stressful as the artificial constraints of the interview process.

Do people typically come in to work at 11? Why do you schedule interviews at 9 AM?

Do people typically have time to think about problems on their own for a bit and start writing up a solution after they understand it? Why don't interviewees?

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

#616

Post by vvanders »

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 love to flip that around in an interview before it even comes up, one of the 3 things I start out any interview with is:

"I'm your Google, anything you'd need to look up just ask me and I'll give you the answer".

Great way to take the pressure off plus it gives you a good idea on how well they ask questions/are comfortable leaning on others. It's a huge plus if I can get a reasonable candidate to admit that there might be parts of the problem at hand they don't understand.

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

#617

Post by zepolen »

quickben wrote: post #606
zepolen wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you weren't productive during that entire time?

So you are telling me you never qualified at a workplace with longer than a month probation period? Do you see how that putting-words-in-others-mouths looks? It's rude and does not contribute too any kind of productive discussion.

Yes I have. I've always qualified, in both short and long probation periods.

I find it rude you didn't answer the question and instead attacked me personally. Terrible.

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

#618

Post by muddyrivers »

cableshaft wrote: post #534
boyter wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really wish more interviews were like this. My favorite onsite interview was when the interviewer printed out a class from the actual system I'd be working on (as I verified for myself later), asked me to figure out what it did, any errors I found, and a few ideas to improve or refactor it. Then he took my code sample and asked me to describe what it did as well. After that he said "Okay, I know you know enough to ha…

I had a very similar experience many years ago. It was an start-up. The interviewer was the ex-CTO of a widely used open source project/product, and led the engineering team in the start-up. Although I regarded myself a good engineer, I was pretty nervous.

After several questions that he was sure I knew the regular stuffs and was qualified for the job, he said he was going to ask some really hard questions to see how much I really knew and what was my thought process. The questions had no simple answers. Each of them required knowledge and experiences from a few technical fields. I didn't know much then. He guided me how to solve the problems, discussed the pros and cons of each approach. Then he told me how they did it, how other products in the same category did it, etc.

The half-hour interview was prolonged to one and a half. At the end, he said, "You have a very intuition on what are the right directions to go when facing unknown complex issues", and gave me an offer. It is my best interview experience. (I didn't join the start-up due to other reasons.)

The technologies have been advanced in a blazing fast speed i the last 10 plus years. Technical interviews, on the contrary, regress in a similar speed.

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

#619

Post by noahc »

spamizbad wrote: post #133
haskellandchill wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is a myth, what do you estimate the figure is? I think under 10%, maybe under 5%. I have significant experience interviewing senior, junior, and mid-range candidates. 99% of my candidates can code, as in iterate over collections, write case statements, and call functions. I've only had one junior candidate who couldn't code at all. Sloppiness is rampant, but sloppy code that gets things done is what…

We set our in-house recruiter up with a coderpad question that screens candidates with a simple question: "Write a function that counts the number of vowels in a string" Candidates are allowed to run it multiple times and just have to produce a correct result within 10 minutes. It's not a trick question -- the test case in place makes sure you pay attention to case. Success rate for mid to senior devs? Only 60%.

As an experiment, I was able to do this in under 3 minutes with ruby. I'd say I'm an average programmer.

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

#620

Post by rambossa »

collyw wrote: post #403
rambossa wrote: post #77

Side note/rant: I hate the Cracking the Coding Interview style... studying for these type of interviews is annoying. Trying to find a good video on youtube, where they aren't just naively coding up the bruteForce->optimal possible solutions, especially is irritating. It is literally a landscape of college kids with thousands of viewers who treat these interviews like the SAT. Even the author of the book produces vide…

Exactly. 95% + of the work out there is more about plumbing and a doesn't design to plumb together. On the rare occasion when I have had anything algorithimc to do I Google for similar problems. The last time I had a proper algorithmic problem, I was in an academic institute and we had a guy researching algorithms so I asked him (though he didn't come up with mush). It was basically a variation the stable roommates p…

OP of the comment here... Actually, I had a production service centered around the stable-roommate-problem. It took me a week or two to develop something out and fit it into our codebase. It then took 1-3 more weeks to actually make it work for us and cover edge cases (Irving's algo quits after instability -- this isnt an option in the real-world). I had many deep-thinking sessions where I was mostly in my head, writing scratch on paper, collab-whiteboarding (sometimes arguing), or testing PoCs.

The success resulted from deep research and much trial & error. It was no magical "algorithmic skillset" that they expect in those type of interviews (I wonder if those are even a good filter for actual production algos).

Here is my simple write-up of SRP: https://medium.com/@rambossa/stable-matching-algorithm-and-h...

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