Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role • Hacker News Board

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

#701

Post by gscott » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

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 have a long text file that I copy and paste out of that has pretty much everything I ever do from read/write from databases to displaying data 90% of everything I do is a variation of the same thing.

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

#702

Post by CM30 » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

I think the issue here (and the one that's causing all this pain and confusion) is that the level of expertise needed for an engineering role depends significantly on the company in question. For instance, a company like Google (or the other ones in the same league) need someone with a lot of programming experience and knowledge of various algorithms, whereas your small agency or company with a web development team might need someone who can install/maintain the CMS and upgrade the plugins every now and again. What's more, the two companies aren't necessarily paying a different wage for said work, so it's entirely possible that someone with far less coding experience is getting paid a small fortune and someone with lots of experience is on the brink of poverty.

The problems we see in interviews (assuming people are lying, awkward technical tests, etc) all come from this mismatch, and people either not understanding what they're capable of or confusing things deliberately. A senior engineer at a small company might be classed as a junior at a large one, and when question time comes, that causes issues.

And I'm not sure what the solution is there. I mean, the needs for each company are different, and there's always certainly a place where a developer of any standard could find a job. If they can do what their employer wants, does it matter if they don't know fizzbuzz or can't write a multiplication table? Probably not.

The real question is likely about how you distinguish between what a junior/midweight/senior developer/engineer is, in a market where those roles could apply to virtually anyone in the industry.

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

#703

Post by kenoyer130 » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

alacombe wrote: post #583

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.

If you come into the interview and say "I am a kernal developer but I want to work on mobile" and you show us a working mobile app you developed on your own, we would consider it. If you come in and say "I am a kernal developer and I want you to take a chance and pay for me to get up to speed on mobile development" that is a harder sell. If you ran a business, would you choose that person or the person who comes in with actual mobile experience and hits the ground running. I sense a lot of hostility in this thread from people who have never been on the other side of the desk. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who interviews a ton of people, and where hiring the wrong person is much worse then not hiring the right person.

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

#704

Post by kenoyer130 » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 3:39 PM UTC

kenoyer130 wrote: post #703

alacombe wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you come into the interview and say "I am a kernal developer but I want to work on mobile" and you show us a working mobile app you developed on your own, we would consider it. If you come in and say "I am a kernal developer and I want you to take a chance and pay for me to get up to speed on mobile development" that is a harder sell. If you ran a business, would you choose that person or the person who comes in w…

Also if your trying to make that drastic a switch, are you willing to take a paycut? Just because someone has 15 years kernal experience does not mean they deserve the same pay for mobile (or visa versa).

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

#705

Post by kenoyer130 » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 3:42 PM UTC

Lich wrote: post #592

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…

@#2: Wow, you mean like they leave without saying anything during the interview?

They asked to use the restroom and never came back. True story.

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

#706

Post by reaperducer » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 3:43 PM UTC

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…

>I hope your not impugning the motives of those who issue take-home assignments.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing.

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

#707

Post by collyw » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 3:46 PM UTC

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.

Depends entirely on the system you are working with.

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

#708

Post by collyw » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 3:55 PM UTC

spirodonfl wrote: post #562

rojobuffalo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Geez I could not agree more. Not only has it, overall, been a bad investment of time (for myself and others I know around me in the field) but so many companies are unclear in what they're looking for in that test to begin with. I wrote a thing about it and I got someone who responded to me with a rather scathing rebuttal. I don't know, it's very conflicting. Post in case you're interested: https://dev.to/spirodonfl/…

Wow, some real dickheads in the replies there.

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

#709

Post by erikpukinskis » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:05 PM UTC

coredog64 wrote: post #558

falcolas wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I hate it as an employee, "at will" employment means that cost simply does not exist for 48 of the 50 US states (including all states where FAANG have employees). The cost is also not that high in non-at-will states, since there's typically a 3-6 month "evaluation" period where no paper trail is required.

Not entirely true. Just because you're in an "at will" state doesn't mean that someone can't allege that they've been fired for belonging to a protected class. That's why companies have HR departments, PIPs, and all that other nonsense -- to protect the company when someone tries to turn a justifiable firing into a payday.

The courts are really not that friendly to the protected class in cases like that.

There’s a lot of political bodies focused on playing up the idea that women and minorities are this big bad wolf suing legitimate businesses left and right over nothing, and winning. But it’s a largely fabricated narrative created by people trying to turn the leftist identitity politics arguments into a quagmire by “both sides!”ing the situation.

In reality there’s a substantial burden of proof for someone to win a wrongful termination suit.

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

#710

Post by collyw » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #392

vorpalhex wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that's a problem, but if I have an entire github of highly starred and heavily developed projects with reasonable commit histories... don't make me do your do damned homework or implement a toy BST. I have better things to do with my personal time than toy problems because you can't be bothered to open my github. The worst part is that usually these toy problems are justified with "but you can post this…

On the one hand, I agree entirely. An interview should not make people jump through hoops if they can answer their questions via existing material. On the other hand, fakers have caught on to the "GitHub is my resume" thing. I have had applicants who have basically fraudulent Github projects, or who have taken group projects on which they did basically nothing and claimed them as their own. So a Github page now requi…

Surely getting them to talk you through the code would solve that problem.

If its is their own code it shouldn't be a problem.

If it isn't their code and they can still talk you through it, even better - they have managed to understand code that someone else wrote which is probably an even more valuable skill.