Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fuzzyblog.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 766 posts

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

#691

Post by tboyd47 »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #190
tboyd47 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but the problem is that unions notoriously favor the older, entrenched generations of a profession over the newcomers. Talk to people from NYC (a place with still much union influence) and you see a stark difference between the old folks and the younger folks in how they view workers' unions. Software development is already so heavily dependent on enthusiastic young people that I don't see how a union could…

"but the problem is that unions notoriously favor the older, entrenched generations of a profession over the newcomers." There's nothing specific about a union that does this. The union is an extension of the will of it's members.

Union membership rates are highest among workers aged 45-64. It may be a self-fulfilling prophecy to say that unions are for the older generation, but I think there would be either non-participation or real resistance from the younger generations of programmers, if only for the perception people have about them.

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

#692

Post by Clubber »

edanm wrote: post #677
Clubber wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean this the way it sounds, but if you can't tell if someone is an imposter by talking shop with them in your chosen profession , you probably shouldn't be doing the interviewing.

You're sometimes right, but sometimes really wrong. I had a candidate for a 3d graphics job, who showed me incredibly impressive things he'd programmed like very realistic water simulations, etc. He talked us through them, was incredibly articulate and clearly knew his stuff. He completely bombed the coding exercise. It was something like: given 2 hours alone at a computer, with a threejs scene already setup, make it…

>You're sometimes right, but sometimes really wrong.

Ya.

As far as graphics, the only time I was ever fooled was by a front end guy in 2005. He brought really nice looking color printouts of his front ends; beautiful stuff. I was really wowed by it; so much I didn't ask him basic programming problems or follow up questions about his prior work, and that was my fault. I allowed myself to be fooled.

His biggest issue was he was lazy. He had grown accustomed to government contracts where you do a lot of prototyping, but nothing ever went live (at least the contracts he had). We had a very aggressive 3 year schedule to build a sophisticated product and he just couldn't or wouldn't keep up. I had to double my workload and he ended up only doing about 5% when he should have done a third and he required a lot of prodding and hand holding. We still managed to ship on time though, but it was really hard on the other 2 people on the team for 3 years.

I'll never make that mistake again.

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

#693

Post by cjg »

edanm wrote: post #677
Clubber wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean this the way it sounds, but if you can't tell if someone is an imposter by talking shop with them in your chosen profession , you probably shouldn't be doing the interviewing.

You're sometimes right, but sometimes really wrong. I had a candidate for a 3d graphics job, who showed me incredibly impressive things he'd programmed like very realistic water simulations, etc. He talked us through them, was incredibly articulate and clearly knew his stuff. He completely bombed the coding exercise. It was something like: given 2 hours alone at a computer, with a threejs scene already setup, make it…

But yet he "clearly knew his stuff".

Perhaps he really was a very talented developer but your coding exercise was too stressful for him. Shame you missed out on hiring him.

This is not a story to show why we should do coding exercises. It is a story to show why they sometimes don't test the right thing.

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

#694

Post by nicoburns »

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…

I feel like take home assignments waste less of my time than an interview that doesn't properly assess my abilities... They're also fantastic for junior devs who can prove themselves without extensive working history.

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

#695

Post by brandall10 »

nerraga wrote: post #199
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…

Can you elaborate you that last statement? Are Rails developers less terrible than the C/C#/C++ people with whom you’ve worked? If so, what are your thoughts on why that may be?

From my experience Rails devs tend to care more about the quality of their work/impact of their changes on teammates, read dev blogs/books, go to meetups, care about testing/documentation, ways to source good candidates and working with good people.

Basically they just care more about doing good work. I must underscore though that my impressions are tempered by the fact that I primarily worked in enterprisey Windows-stack jobs, but that's also more typical - you're not going to find many modern startups going w/ .NET or Java. The tools themselves aren't really the problem, it's the implied culture.

Why is this? Probably because of the goals of each. .NET and Java were an outpouring of efforts from the 90s to harness issues of scale on enterprise systems. It's a pre vs. post information age phenomena, open source folks are going to be more of a hobbyist mindset.

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

#696

Post by kamaal »

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…

>>creating 10x situations.

This is so correct.

Productivity follows when people are working for a worthy cause. In fact the core of productivity isn't lists, management techniques or whatever, it is a thing called 'constancy of purpose'

There exist no such a thing called 10x burger flipper.

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

#697

Post by edanm »

cjg wrote: post #693
edanm wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're sometimes right, but sometimes really wrong. I had a candidate for a 3d graphics job, who showed me incredibly impressive things he'd programmed like very realistic water simulations, etc. He talked us through them, was incredibly articulate and clearly knew his stuff. He completely bombed the coding exercise. It was something like: given 2 hours alone at a computer, with a threejs scene already setup, make it…

But yet he "clearly knew his stuff". Perhaps he really was a very talented developer but your coding exercise was too stressful for him. Shame you missed out on hiring him. This is not a story to show why we should do coding exercises. It is a story to show why they sometimes don't test the right thing.

Your interpretation does theoretically fit with the facts. But so do a few other (in my mind more plausible) stories, like:

1. He knows how to do extremely specialized things in an existing environment, but can't do things outside of that environment.

2. He was presenting work that he had only a partial hand in creating.

3. He is amazing at e.g. C++, but cannot learn even rudimentary new things in Javascript.

...

Some of these stories make him a terrible programmer. Some of them make him an OK programmer for other positions, but weren't relevant for us. None of the stories make him a particularly great programmer.

"Perhaps he really was a very talented developer but your coding exercise was too stressful for him"

Yes, it's possible. A lot of things are possible. But I'm sorry - if someone can't copy-paste a 3 line program from the internet and get it to work, in their own field, for 2 hours, then... I don't know how I could ever design a test on which they won't fail. Including the actual job.

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

#698

Post by brandall10 »

NewEntryHN wrote: post #356
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'm curious about the transition from C/C++/C# to Rails/React/Angular. What did make you switch?

I read a book called "The Passionate Programmer" in 2009 that turned me on to what was happening in the open source community at the time. It was the first I had heard of Rails, Ycombinator/Hacker News, alot of things really.

During the last few years doing Windows-stack work I was a top performer at the company I was working with, had gotten two relatively recent promotions, turned down an op going into management, and was so unhappy that I considered leaving software altogether. Transitioning to open source stack work 'lifted the cloud' - so to speak - and reinvigorated my love of programming.

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

#700

Post by brynjolf »

hashfunktion wrote: post #683

Senior level dev here (6+ years). My last job search was brutal. I aced my interviews but still got a lot of rejections. The feedback included * the team thinks you’re a great engineer, but you didn’t show enough excitement about the company * we think you’re a solid engineer but not quite at the senior level yet, it’s ok though, we reject 98% of our candidates * we do a lot of code story telling at our team (I kid y…

Code telling? What is that? I'm sorry about the job but that sounds hilarious.
Post reply on HN