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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

#621

Post by Rumudiez »

zepolen wrote: post #617
quickben wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sad! Terrible, really. So terrible. You wouldn't believe it. Just terrible.

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

#622

Post by nickthemagicman »

Job Hound is seriously cool!

If enough people start using it a database could be built on companies hiring practices, what percentage of applicants is accepted/rejected, coding test type, and all kinds of other potential big data about companies.

That data would be super valuable to us as a tech community applying to jobs.

Also, love the browser integration that populates the forms!

If you get enough help to work on it/funding a mobile app would be killer.

Could you show the job description on the page after clicking on the bookmarklet?

And also on the show job page?

At first I thought it wasn't populating and it's super useful info because if a job is removed it's nice to have visible!

Awesome job!

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

#623

Post by sumobob »

volkk wrote: post #411
eastbayjake wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're way ahead of the game, OP. We talk a big talk in our industry about hackers and meritocracy, but this is still a relationships business -- like every other business. At most companies if you're cold-applying to a position on a job board, you're already behind your competition. I'd like to propose an alternative job hunt: (1) Start thinking about your next move before you need a job. (2) Send an email or DM to…

sounds great except now that person forwarded the resume, and you still have to do the exact rounds that you would have done when cold calling unless you're applying to a small shop

you can usually skip a round or 2, and also get a bit of leniency

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

#624

Post by muddyrivers »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #171
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…

Last paragraph is a hidden gem, should be pinned at the top of the page. Perhaps a blog post? :D

I agree. On the other hand, we engineers need to look at ourselves in the mirror. After all, we engineers conduct the technical interview.

I was involved in hundreds of tech interviews in the past several years. So many times in discussing a candidate's performance, I found some of the interviewers' questions and comments were unrealistic, even preposterous. In one case, an interviewer gave a hard dynamic programming question. We were a tech company and had very good engineers. Our products and our technologies, however, rarely need dynamic programming skills of this difficult level. I couldn't bear it. So I asked, "who think he can solve this problem on the whiteboard in 40 minutes right now?" Dead silence.

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

#625

Post by jasode »

kbenson wrote: post #597
jasode wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You actually agree with each other. It doesn't seem like it. The next 3 sentences from the thegayngler: > 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. In my mind, programmers superior to me have abilities that would be beyond my knowledge to "guide" them. They can come up with programming solutions I could never th…

> In my mind, programmers superior to me have abilities that would be beyond my knowledge to "guide" them. Presumably, in your mind, "programming" skill is along one spectrum and one focus, as well? I think that's part of what's being talked about here. There are many, many aspects to software engineering/programming (depending on whether you want to classify them differently), and many roads that could have been tak…

>There are many, many aspects to software engineering/programming [...] I see no reason to think that someone that is better or worse than me in one aspect will also be so in every one of the other aspects of the job.

Let me try to restate that in more general terms and you can tell me if I interpreted it correctly: Since programming skill is multi-dimensional / multi-faceted, and it is unlikely for a programmer to be superior in _all_ dimensions compared to another, it is therefore not possible to conclude if one programmer is superior to another.

Is that a fair rewording?

My response is... sure, programming skill can be looked at as multi-dimensional. But so can other real-world comparisons. We prioritize the dimensions that are more important and collapse all aspects into a composite score.

Multidimensions such as choosing a new job: Company X is a 5-minute commute with 4 weeks vacation but Company Y has the newest technology and has lucrative stock options. Yes, it already goes without saying that there's more than 1 aspect of "desirable working conditions" at each company and no single company can claim a superior score on _all_ aspects. We can still weigh all aspects and eventually pick one (and only one) which is superior.

If I hired a "Jeff Dean" type of programmer, it would be an upgrade to my team and my company. Could I search for an "aspect" that I'm better at than him? Well, looking over his expertise[1], it looks like he doesn't have much frontend GUI programming experience. So yes, I guess I could claim superior skill on writing event handlers in C# language for buttons. That's not important though for my assessment. My point is I don't need for programmers to be superior to me in every aspect for me to determine that they are superior overall. (Same as determining which company is "superior" to work for.)

If I was founding a startup and I was the "ceiling" of programming skill instead of the minimum "baseline", my company would fail. I think I'm pretty decent at programming but I have no Dunning-Kruger delusions that I can "train" anybody that can pass FizzBuzz into a "Jeff Dean". I know of no 6-week bootcamp or even a 6-month corporate training program that can claim that feat. What I can do is recognize the programming skills in others that are (overall) superior to mine and hopefully convince the candidates to come work with me.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NMS69lQAAAAJ&hl=en

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

#626

Post by komali2 »

stevenwoo wrote: post #582
komali2 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I totally understand your feelings. This was the #1 killer of post-boot camp students. Some undefinable capital was exhausted.

Because we've yet to define what that "tank" is, and because assigning a graduates likelihood to become employed to the depth of their "tank" was unacceptable, it was always taught to instead remove yourself as much as possible from every application.

Remind yourself for every one that a rejection will happen for any reason that has nothing to do with you. A lost resume. A position closed. You'll never know. Therefore, any emotional investment is wasted.

Gotta get robotic about it mang

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

#627

Post by danbmil99 »

Actually now that I think of it, if I'm being cynical, the process described in the article is precisely what I would come up with if I wanted to be biased against older experienced people without admitting that was my motive.

8 hours of homework for the person with the kids who won't have time for it, check

Tests optimized for people with young, facile minds who are recently used to cramming random data into their heads spitting it back out, check

Complete disregard for domain level knowledge, specialization, or the value of experience, check.

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

#628

Post by city41 »

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,…

Then I'd argue they need to make that more clear. The typical interview setting does not suggest it's an "exploratory" environment, it usually feels more like taking an exam.

At my last company, we would sit a candidate down at a pairing station. We'd offer them about 5 problems to choose from, and together we'd pair program on the problem for 2 hours. Using the internet, the IDE, anything they want was totally fair game. No system is perfect, but this was by far the best one I've ever experienced.

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

#629

Post by danbmil99 »

danbmil99 wrote: post #627

Actually now that I think of it, if I'm being cynical, the process described in the article is precisely what I would come up with if I wanted to be biased against older experienced people without admitting that was my motive. 8 hours of homework for the person with the kids who won't have time for it, check Tests optimized for people with young, facile minds who are recently used to cramming random data into their h…

This process doesn't filter for competence. It filters for people with fanatical enthusiasm to jump through hoops. It filters for people who will be young, impressionable, and prone to being exploited.

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

#630

Post by brianwawok »

freyir wrote: post #604
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can get sued for firing them. Sued for multiples of their annual salary.

Then that's the heart of the problem, and it should be fixed.

How do you create laws that both

a) Protect a vulnerable class of people from being fired (say over 40 people)

and not

b) Require 30 forms when firring someone in that class for perfectly valid reasons

Seems really really hard to hit both. You need to err on one side or another.. which way do you go?

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