171–180 of 694 posts
> When hiring senior engineers, the company doesn’t choose the candidate, the candidate chooses the company. Does that mean its the candidates fault when they can't find a job?
That's hilarious and so true. Last year I interviewed for a senior back-end engineering position at a well known mid-sized company in the Bay Area. They put me through 2 technical phone screens and a 6 hour onsite interview, grilling me in detail about system design, domain knowledge, personal experience, and of course doing endless exercises of writing solutions to algorithmic problems on a whiteboard. I really felt…
One thing I will say is that for many employers, a "no" now doesn't mean a "no" forever.
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Strongest possible disagree. There are people who can talk all the way down to the point where they're basically dictating code to you, who nevertheless cannot deliver on a real project. There's a difference between knowing, intellectually, how to solve a problem with code, and actually being able to deliver working code . In practice, though, what really seems to happen is that technical interviews are split between…
> It's not like we were asking candidates "hey, how did you enjoy your last software security job?". We were doing something closer to "here's a piece of code with a heap overflow in it; talk us through how you'd write an exploit". It didn't work: there were people who could answer those questions indistinguishably from an exploit developer who nevertheless couldn't write a 1995-era stack overflow exploit if their li…
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I won't apply at, or respond to recruiters representing, those companies that have a reputation for a long and/or torturous hiring process. While I have no interest in being interrogated with high-stress puzzle solving, it is not the interview process itself that causes my disinterest; it is the understanding, from experience, that how a company treats its potential candidates is often reflective of its general cultu…
This also applies to when you're actually interviewing. I once went through three rounds and they wanted a fourth. No is such a powerful and unexpected word. That they're still talking to you means they're interested but that they haven't offered you the job means they're not 100% sure. This one scenario I said No they came back with an offer. But it was rejected.
I agree with a lot of the points here. One specific pet peeve of mine is job listings that refuse to nail down which specific technologies they're using. Some will say things like "Front-end web development using a framework such as ExtJS, React, Vue, or Angular". Neat - which one? I'm happy to work with 1 or maybe 2 of those. Do you mean that you actually use React but you're fine with people who come from some othe…
Either way, I purposely avoid those type of job postings. I don't want to waste so much as 10 minutes on a phone screening to find out that even though you mention Ember or React that what you really want is someone with Angular 1 experience.
A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…
I recall an interview I was brought into early in my career to talk with someone being brought into be a senior architect... in my mind this meant this dude must be crazy smart right. Everyone in room had all basically made up thier minds and loved the guy. I gave a variable like a = [1,2,4,8,9]; And asked if he could write a loop and print out the values of each element. He embarrassingly could not. I always ask thi…
A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…
It comes down to interest. A good senior got that way because they like solving challenging problems. They are not interested in trendy framework bullshit. In other words talk about the problems and potential solutions. Are things in place to make the job easier? Seniors don’t need easier and this is a huge turnoff.
When I hear companies try to sell me with frameworks and process I know they are blowing smoke. At the very least they are boring and at worst you will be working with incompetent people who are as self-diluted as the company. I agree that filtering candidates is a good idea though.
The reason why some companies cannot figure this out is because they don’t value the problems at hand. They need bodies to put fingers on keyboards and are willing to pay more for people who don’t completely suck. Experience and competence are not the same as excellence but considering the candidate pool I can see why companies compromise on quality.
A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…
A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…
It's a great 15 minute question that I find often correlates highly with the people that get offers.
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I find this "salary first" a little bullshit too. For the most part it's true, but it's not strictly true. If Amazon offers me $180k but I need to work like a slave, but a startup offers $150k but is very chill, I'm gonna choose the startup.
What if Google or Facebook offer you $300k no risk, with a relatively standard work life balance. Then you have to really carefully weigh the startup equity package and how much you enjoy the respective work environments.
If. People here sometimes make it seem like a senior engineer can just walk into a FAANG, chat with the receptionist, and walk out with a $300k offer. While it is certainly not the hardest thing in the world, these companies are still pretty selective and only employ about 10% of the total seniors in the market. More likely than not you are not getting that kind of offer. This isn't even taking into account downleveling, which Google in particular is notorious for.