With near-record low unemployment and rising wages, conditions are near optimal. It's very difficult to imagine some environment where the people suffering today are going to do better.
Conditions are pretty much maxed out.
Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment
191–200 of 210 posts
Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've taught how to program a blog from scratch. I the code on my machine and could post it on Github. I never knew people cared. Thanks for pointing it out so clearly. Some nuance: I'm a CS grad, so this perspective is relative to that. Weak: SQL optimization, I have no clue. Mediocre: SQL itself, I understand everything at sqlteaching.com and I never had an issue at work doing SQL. Strong-ish: ORMs, read the API doc…
SQL optimization is a bit overrated, IMO. I code in SQL and R daily, and my experience is that most SQL scripts, it doesn't matter if it takes 6 seconds or 60 seconds. What matters is deeply understanding what your row is, how to join other data onto those rows, and how to effectively communicate/analyze the data after you get your final dataset. If you can't do the last step, it doesn't matter how fast your code run…
I think I have a good understanding of SQL optimization, and it came from an environment of writing endless adhoc SQL for database updates and reports, where, no, it didn't matter in the least if your query took 6 seconds or 60 seconds.
But the challenge was to write and run a query in a matter of minutes and not hours, or days, or weeks, and not to spend time on false starts or elaborate queries that left you uncertain if your results were correct.
When I first started, I would write something, and start it running, and wait. And then after five minutes, you're thinking, well, I have to finish this within half an hour, is it going to take 10 minutes or weeks, in which case I need to try something different? But then, if I cancel it, was it about to finish, in which case I wasted five minutes, and if I do that three times, it's going to be late? I've seen queries where the time estimate goes in reverse and it starts out predicting 2 minutes to finish and 10 minutes later it's saying days or weeks. And the results were needed ten minutes ago.
Optimization becomes important when you're talking about several orders of magnitude, and opportunities are all around in a business environment. I was given a report script in T-SQL once that did the job it was supposed to adequately on a few hundred (maybe thousand) documents but my manager wanted to run it on all the things - millions of documents on hundreds of databases. It turned out to be very doable, but required changing a largely procedural script that ran SQL in a loop to a single query that was something like 10,000 times faster.
Worrying about 6ms -> 6s -> 6min isn't the environment I'm used to. It was always about human scale time - will it be done in 15 minutes, will it be done by the court deadline tomorrow, will it be done this week, or this month.
What I learned from an inhumanly talented analyst was that the Oracle optimizer is the enemy of performance and predictability, and the way to get reliable, fast results is to break down things into simple queries and temp tables and ignore gurus like Tom Kyte that say all those fancy database features are there for a reason and you should write beautiful multipage masses of SQL. (someone like Kyte would also say if the optimizer is fighting you the database is configured wrong, which might be true but is utterly unhelpful in what I consider the real world where the admins exist to tell you "no" or ignore you)
Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment
#193I'm honestly experiencing this as a CS grad in the Dutch job market. I find it weird and frustrating. I've noticed why: 1. Companies don't dare to value creativity [1]. University is so liberal and the job market is so the opposite. 2. Most companies can't value a CS degree. The exception is when enough people in the company did a CS degree and that's a lot more rare than I thought. 3. University didn't teach me to f…
TLDR; The cost of a bad hire is extremely high and not worth the risk. I'm a team lead and do a fair number of interviews. It's amazing how many people can talk about their experience and make a ton of really impressive statements that makes it appear as though they are knowledgeable and then that person can't perform a simple coding exercise. On the other hand, it's equally amazing how a person can do an excellent j…
Do you find that junior hires are typically inflexible when it comes to personality and or coding skills? Or are we talking about more experienced hires who shouldn’t need as much investment and resources to get up to par. As a college senior who’s terrible at recruiting, I’m confused about employer expectations in this regard.
Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment
#194With near-record low unemployment and rising wages, conditions are near optimal. It's very difficult to imagine some environment where the people suffering today are going to do better. Conditions are pretty much maxed out.
If conditions were optimal, then we should be expecting rising inflation due to a tighter labor market. That hasn’t been the case.
Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like the company made the right decision based on your words alone. The tone of your description of their "CRUD applications" comes across as dismissive. What the company wants is people who are happy to work there or at least not unhappy enough to leave (and, even better, will keep their unhappiness to themselves). The company wants this more than technical ability. You might be really talented but it seem…
Note: I see you're being downvoted. While your comment may sound harsh, I see it as well meant advice and take the candor of the message as something valuable. And now that I think of it, I can definitely see that I come across as submissive. I'm reflecting on myself on whether I am dismissive, which I find very tough to answer (on the one hand no because CRUD apps are valuable, on the other hand yes, because CRUD ap…
I think you're looking at this from the wrong angle.
CRUD is to development what a hammer is to a carpenter or someone framing a house. It's just a tool you use to get the job done, not the part of the job you find rewarding (building the product).
If you want some unsolicited advice, stop looking at CRUD jobs or jobs that mention it extensively. Go out and find an industry that interests you and look for engineering roles at companies in that industry you'd like to work at. It may involve CRUD, it may not. Regardless, it's weird to focus on that part of the gig exclusively.
Personally, all my jobs have been independent of the tech stack or what they use to solve the problem. I've done backend stuff, embedded, a bit of GUI design, desktop apps... all of it was motivated by the industries that the companies were focused on and the products they made. Not the tech they used to build them.
Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not "stealing"
What would you call 9 people in a group of ten voting to take away the tenth guy’s stuff because they wanted to? I call it what it is - stealing. Greed. Envy. Interestingly, it will probably lead to more equality; it just won’t be what you’re expecting and I don’t think you’ll like the result. At this point though, the people probably deserve to get what they want and get it good and hard.
Small thought experiment: Imagine an agricultural society where the nobility own the land, and serfs work it for subsistence wages only. The nobility largely don't work, and live lavish lifestyles supported by others. Nothing too unusual historically. In those circumstances, is maintaining the status quo the only morally correct choice, and any deviation from that "stealing?"
I don't think it's reasonable to measure a society's morality by its tax rates only or to draw an equivalence between taxes and theft.
It's true that minimal government and taxes worked well in the US's early history. But if you think about it, that was an agricultural society where the main source of capital, land, was practically free. It's not surprising that relatively pure capitalism worked OK then, but historically it seems to have worked out less well in almost all other circumstances.
These days a lot of capital is in stocks in global corporations, with barriers to entry measured in the billions of dollars. It's not as simple as moving to the frontier and finding your own plot of land.
I think an ideal society delivers broad-based prosperity and individual freedoms with a dynamic market economy. And tax policy should preserve incentives to work and invest efficiently. But if there is a conflict between broad-based prosperity and zero tax rates / income redistribution, like in the example society above, the former should definitely be chosen over the latter.
I think going the other way around, rather than leading to a capitalist paradise, will only lead to the rise of ideologies that advocate heavy-handed state control of the economy, probably to the detriment of everyone.
Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't have respect for CRUD apps, why are you trying to get a job doing CRUD apps?
Compared to most forms of programming, it doesn't give me a headache. Or at least not enough of a headache to suffer under it. I think that's also part of why I sound arrogant according to people? CRUD never made me suffer. Other types of programming definitely did. CRUD does have challenges, especially when it needs to be on a large scale and performant. Another reason is that I'm a digital creator at heart, not a p…
>Another reason is that I'm a digital creator at heart, not a programmer. Ultimately, I don't care about programming, I care about putting whatever is in my mind into the real world (despite that I did my best to learn CS as I did find it a valuable form of knowledge). And I find programming to be the most effective way to do that. I think creating CRUD apps is quite close to digital creation.
Focusing on this and working "value creation" in to it will come across a lot better than anything that could be interpreted as "CRUD apps are easy and I'm looking to bludge for a while before I bail to something challenging again".
Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
God forbid you make a small mistake on a technical interview or don't know the "trick" to answer a leetcode question. Any small mistake is enough to crucify you, and previous employment experience is ignored in favor of basing 100% on technical interviews.
> Any small mistake is enough to crucify you Completely true. If you don't immediately and perfectly know the most efficient algo to solve graph inversion or whatever random problem they found on leetcode that day, kiss any chances of a callback goodbye. Oh and be prepared for a hundred rounds of relentless grilling. I don't know why it gets peddled around that it's easy to find jobs in CS. It seems as hard as findin…
> It seems as hard as finding a break in hollywood.
Well put!
Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what do you propose we do about that?
I have no idea. Wealth transfer? Training programs? Basic income?
Maybe we should build lots of housing around (at least some of) the areas where economic opportunity is concentrated. Many US cities exist as they are today due to people looking for economic opportunities in the past (for example Chicago grew from 299,000 to around 1.7 million in a 30 year period).
These days it seems like non-professionals are priced out of all the most booming cities (despite there being plenty of non-professional work available). I don't think it's a coincidence that it's currently very difficult to get permission to build in many of those places (in 2014 Tokyo permitted 70% more housing units than all of California, despite having 1/3 the population). The under-supply of housing in places California of course increases the demand elsewhere too since those people that would otherwise live in California have to live somewhere.
Basic income could help mobility too since it makes it easier for lower-income people to move to where the jobs are (where they may not have a family safety net). Currently internal US migration is at a historically low level.
Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
SQL optimization is a bit overrated, IMO. I code in SQL and R daily, and my experience is that most SQL scripts, it doesn't matter if it takes 6 seconds or 60 seconds. What matters is deeply understanding what your row is, how to join other data onto those rows, and how to effectively communicate/analyze the data after you get your final dataset. If you can't do the last step, it doesn't matter how fast your code run…
I think I have a good understanding of SQL optimization, and it came from an environment of writing endless adhoc SQL for database updates and reports, where, no, it didn't matter in the least if your query took 6 seconds or 60 seconds. But the challenge was to write and run a query in a matter of minutes and not hours, or days, or weeks, and not to spend time on false starts or elaborate queries that left you uncert…
Re: human timescales, I have also run into this in my career. I wrote calibration and test software a few years ago, and it didn’t matter if a test took 1 minute, 3 minutes, or 10 minutes, because those were all “push the button, sit there and wait” scale. 15-30 minutes is “push the button and take a short break.” 60-90 minutes is “push the button, go to lunch,” and so on.
We had tests that ran for up to 24 hours, but, when optimizing, it didn’t matter if I could make it run faster, unless I could get it down below 8 hours, because that was the next fastest time scale.