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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

#751

Post by freyir »

brianwawok wrote: post #630
freyir wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Document repeated negative performance or toxic behavior and then act on it.

There are plenty of people in non-vulnerable classes who regularly do indefensible things because they know their companies won't act on it.

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

#752

Post by Cookiesaurusbex »

brianwawok wrote: post #630
freyir wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Untie a person's ability to survive from their employment status. If we had universal healthcare and basic income then the necessity of most of the employment laws would cease to exist.

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

#753

Post by wst_ »

vvanders wrote: post #616
michaelchisari wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

This is fantastic. Often I am wondering should we start test how good engineers are in asking questions for search engines. I am not going to write the perfect compilable code for them, I have a tools to tell me if I forgot the semicolon in line 31. I don't need to remember standard library 100% and recall all functions' signatures - I have a docs for that. But I should be able to ask meaningful questions that get me closer to the answer and I should do it efficiently. We have tools now, we should start using it instead of memorizing things.

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

#754

Post by jameshart »

walshemj wrote: post #732
jameshart wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah. Did I not mention that these CSV files I wanted you to parse... they're generated by an old mainframe system we can't modify the sourcecode to. It does have a few idiosyncracies - for fields like addresses which can contain commas, it uses a special escape sequence where the field just consists of three asterisks, then the value for that field is the content of the next line. Oh, and it uses just CR characters fo…

So presumably the mainframe has code that can parse these non standard files? Just take that code and build "on the mainframe" a tool that converts their non standard csv to something more usable.

Great. Can you show me on the whiteboard what the code for that tool might look like?

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

#755

Post by twodave »

Clubber wrote: post #527
twodave wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think unless you're prideful enough to believe you can identify someone's level of productivity from a short conversation, it's probably better to see the proof. Again, why would I settle for a conversation when I can ask for first-hand proof? It's like a judge dismissing concrete evidence and just basing their verdict on the circumstantial. Sure, it's likely to be right most of the time, but what about when it isn…

>I think unless you're prideful enough to believe you can identify someone's level of productivity None of the techniques discussed in this article are even attempting to judge productivity, they are attempts to judge coding ability. It's good that you bring up productivity though; that's what we are really after, isn't it? >from a short conversation I'd argue 30 minutes to an hour is not a short conversation. Do you…

IMO if you're testing for algorithm memorization you're doing it wrong. I prefer to give someone a really simple exercise and then challenge them with added complexity to see how they adjust (since this is what most real work looks like anyway).

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

#756

Post by twodave »

ryanianian wrote: post #513
twodave wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm supposed to spend my time researching your GH instead of just letting you spend 5 minutes proving it? There isn't enough time in a day to research every candidate's code they wrote on their own time (and personally I'd rather not be judged by mine). And, if people lie on their resumes already, what makes me trust their GH? It's like saying here's an essay I wrote, you don't need to talk to me in person, I"ll j…

Yes. It's a lot of work on both sides to interview and be interviewed. If you don't take a candidate's prior art into consideration, you're wasting everyone's time. You're also eliminating candidates who may excel in ways that aren't solving riddle-problems out-loud in front of new people when their livelihood is on the line. Start with the GH and if you have doubts fall back to portions of old model. > So I'm suppos…

This is fair, it's just not realistic for a lot of places. In the places where I've worked and interviewed people, this was not my main responsibility. Typically I'd get a resume that morning and have to prioritize looking at it along with whatever else I had going on that day.

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

#757

Post by mogget »

@fuzzygroup: First, this is awesome. It's a great example of channeling annoyance at Badness. As someone said, "Better to light a candle than curse the darkness".

I tend to agree with a lot of your points.

Re: JobHound, can you clarify your thoughts on what sort of privacy users should expect? Obviously a lot the value to those fully in the hunt will be using it to efficiently navigate public sites, but there are also private opportunities and some that might be sensitive. Any thoughts? Obviously easy to work around by separating job sets, but thought it might be valuable to others, too.

Thanks again!

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

#758

Post by iamcasen »

tonyarkles wrote: post #738
iamcasen wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I come from a different land, but in my field, knowing a specific language intimately is not as important as knowing the wider scope of software engineering and distributed system design. I'm not a developer who is down in the weeds optimizing specific algorithms though, and I can see how a mastery of language-specific data structures and how they are represented in memory might be required for such a person.

> I'm not a developer who is down in the weeds optimizing specific algorithms though, and I can see how a mastery of language-specific data structures and how they are represented in memory might be required for such a person. I say this after having done an M.Sc. in Distributed Systems focused on performance analysis. In a lot of cases that I've encountered, mastery of data structures and choosing languages and runt…

Absolutely! But you if you're interviewing, and you haven't been in the weeds lately, I think it's unreasonable to get passed up for a job because you don't know the nuances of some language specific feature.

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

#759

Post by scoggs »

magduf wrote: post #358
scoggs wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like sometimes it's out of the applicants hands if they come by way of a recruiter / head hunter. Sometimes non-junior devs who aren't quite to senior developer status yet have no control over the recruiters mistaking your pay at previous jobs and the pay you could make next time for the level of job you should be applying for / able to handle. I've run into this issue in different specific ways earlier in my…

I'm a senior engineer and have worked with recruiters many times before, and I've pretty much come to the conclusion that they're a big waste of time unless you want to do the 6-month contracting thing to avoid resume gaps or you just like moving around the country and renting rooms. I've tried working with them before, have gone on job interviews through them, and then generally found that the jobs that hire through…

It's not in their favor to find you an ideal, direct hire / non-contract gig. There is no chance for future money from a client if they find you your perfect fit / long term career type job.

Not to mention most of the one's I worked with early in their career not only had no idea about any of the technologies they were checking to see if I was fluent in but they also acted like they DID know everything about programming and beyond that they tried to flaunt this fact and treat me like I was trying to overstate my skills to sneak my way into a job out of my pay range.

Such a frustrating ecosystem in order to find a career job.

In ten years I can count on 1 hand how many times I've gotten a reply from a non-recruiter job I applied for (applied on my own without a staffing agency submitting / representing me).

It's really crazy how that works.

Another thing I dealt with was people who hired me saying (TO MY FACE):

In this situation I'm making $35.00/hr as a Regular Developer (non-junior / non-senior dev, just a middle of the road contract developer):

CEO of company in front of everyone: "scoggs we are paying way more for you than we are for our senior developers so we are expecting top notch work from you."

Me (used to it by now, unfazed but I hate this situation): "Sir with all respect I'm only getting less than 1/2 of what you pay my staffing agency for my contract/"

CEO: "well they don't really do anything / didn't really do anything but introduce us and get you a phone and in person interview with us."

Me: "But you guys didn't have to pull programmers, HR, and design / copy writing people off of their normal work to create interview materal, submit interview material, review resumes, vet candidates, plan phone interviews and schedule them, set aside time for phone interviews, review phone interview candidates among 'hiring team', review candidates references, plan in person interviews and schedule them, execute in person interviews and have meetings with 'hiring team' to pick who to hire', make offers to people you want to hire, or hire them. All you had to do was tell the staffing agency what skills your were looking for and what kind of company you were. I'm not an employee of your company. I don't have insurance, I don't get paid for sick days, I don't get paid for holidays, and I have no job security."

Of course I didn't say all of this, I said something along the lines of "They take care of the majority of the process" but in my head I feel like I'm always having to live up to the expectations of the people paying the total bill. The same way they think the staffing agency doesn't do any real work and isn't worth the cost / price of doing business -- most of these people feel the same way about developers. They don't understand what we do, they just expect us to solve anything and everything to do with computers / programming / technology and this is ALWAYS the way it is regardless if the final product / project outcome is directly tied to the company suddenly turning a profit based on the success of this project / programming endeavor.

These companies want to underpay contract developers, pile stress on their shoulders, guilt them for the situation they have little to no control over, and then stick them with the majority of the blame if things don't go 200% well (because they are expecting work that's 2x as good as the amount of money I'm being paid).

I've found it impossible to truly and personally (mentally) live up to the majority of expectations laid upon my shoulders by non-technical CEO's / Presidents / Bosses of companies I've worked for.

This is the majority of what I deal with right outside of NYC in Northern New Jersey. There is the rare company that truly respects the programmers they hire (usually companies where programmers have become CEOs / Presidents / people in powerful positions within the company who wield influence).

I love the money I make in this market but I truly hate the way everything makes me feel even when the situation is like this yet I am able to deliver above and beyond expectations. I hate working for people and in situations where it feels like I'm being told I'm robbing the company when meanwhile the recruiter is robbing us both yet they have us pitted against one another -- and beyond that the staffing agency has a 2 year lock on me being able to accept a job from that company without them "buying out" my contract.

The cost of buying out a contract? A university wanted to do that once early in my career (I wish I was still working there frankly, 10 years later), but the staffing agency wanted 2x the amount the university was paying the staffing agency! I was making $60,000/yr at that point so on top of the University paying me somewhere in the realm of $60,000/yr they would have also had to pay the staffing agency ~$240,000 just for the right to hire me. That means they would have had to shell out $300,000 total including my salary and the buyout.

Nothing about that seems right and / or legal. Under no circumstances would I ever be worth that much to the staffing agency and honestly with the amount of work they actually do I feel like it's damn near criminal.

No State University that pays employees with citizen's tax money is ever going to be able to justify spending that type of money on 1 employee. It's just a fantasy of epic proportions.

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

#760

Post by eecc »

shagie wrote: post #724
eecc wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's right... even prime isn't enough

Prime is ok if it’s multiplied (there is one and only one prime factorization of a number).... but that can get to absurdly large numbers. Still, consider the word ‘abe’ with a = 2, b = 3, c = 5, d = 7 and e = 11. abe would then be 2^1 * 3^1 * 5^0 * 7^0 * 11^1. ‘abba’ would be 2^2 * 3^2. Each anagram would have a distinct value. See also Gödel numbering and FRACTRAN.

That’s right... stupid me, it’s the base of public key cryptography (doh)
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