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Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

jarednelsen.dev

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Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#321

Post by chad_strategic »

bitcoinmoney wrote: post #149
chad_strategic wrote: post #76

I have always hated software engineering interviews. This is a popular topic on this site, but nothing ever changes. Not sure as I would call them dystopian, I generally thought they were a chance for a senior dev to parade his ego. I could tell stories... (As I'm sure everybody else...) I used to take interviews and I always knew the outcome. "Sorry you are self taught, we only want people with CS degrees." "Or you…

Can you explain more? How did you find a trading company that hires non formally trained devs? They seem to be the type to only look at Harvard grads etc.

So what I didn’t mention in my response for the sake of brevity. I have an MBA in finance and a register investment advisor. With out going into a lot of detail... I became a programmer/coder in 2010-2011 because having an MBA didn’t really help your job prospects back then. For some reason stepping away from my financial knowledge and some life events that alter my career path.

About a year or so I decided it was time to get back to my financial knowledge of markets and my ability to program. I need to get out of the trap of a dead end programming job. (I was working in Drupal 8... it doesn’t get any worse) I already had one stock algorithm so I started working on an options algo. Then via the internet I ran across a family office that needed assistance with a futures algo. I’m luckily because I have strong academic understanding of financial markets and the ability to build algo and write code to api’s.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#322

Post by chad_strategic »

vsareto wrote: post #184
chad_strategic wrote: post #76

I have always hated software engineering interviews. This is a popular topic on this site, but nothing ever changes. Not sure as I would call them dystopian, I generally thought they were a chance for a senior dev to parade his ego. I could tell stories... (As I'm sure everybody else...) I used to take interviews and I always knew the outcome. "Sorry you are self taught, we only want people with CS degrees." "Or you…

Btw you have a missing table error at the page: http://www.strategic-options.com/trade/portfolio/hardline (this is the Portfolio button URL in the nav bar)

Thanks, I got clean up my act.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#323

Post by chad_strategic »

bitcoinmoney wrote: post #149
chad_strategic wrote: post #76

I have always hated software engineering interviews. This is a popular topic on this site, but nothing ever changes. Not sure as I would call them dystopian, I generally thought they were a chance for a senior dev to parade his ego. I could tell stories... (As I'm sure everybody else...) I used to take interviews and I always knew the outcome. "Sorry you are self taught, we only want people with CS degrees." "Or you…

Can you explain more? How did you find a trading company that hires non formally trained devs? They seem to be the type to only look at Harvard grads etc.

I got lucky with the family office job. But before that I was trying to figure out how to market my stock trading algo. (Still looking for a online marketing person)

Sure if you want to work in a co location, high frequency trading firm you might need a Harvard degree, but there is no reason that you can’t write your own profitable algo.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#324

Post by chad_strategic »

bitcoinmoney wrote: post #149
chad_strategic wrote: post #76

I have always hated software engineering interviews. This is a popular topic on this site, but nothing ever changes. Not sure as I would call them dystopian, I generally thought they were a chance for a senior dev to parade his ego. I could tell stories... (As I'm sure everybody else...) I used to take interviews and I always knew the outcome. "Sorry you are self taught, we only want people with CS degrees." "Or you…

Can you explain more? How did you find a trading company that hires non formally trained devs? They seem to be the type to only look at Harvard grads etc.

I would recommend reading micheal Lewis flash boys. Great book also very insightful.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#325

Post by bambataa »

dahart wrote: post #282
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #240

I've mentioned this before. I have a portfolio that consists of six figures LoC of code, across dozens of open-source repos; most of which I am the 100% sole author. I've written a fairly large open-source system that is rapidly becoming the world standard for a specific (rather small) demographic. It deliberately uses old and rather primitive technology (which is a big reason for it becoming a standard). I've writte…

> no one bothers to look at my portfolio [...] I usually send a couple of links [...] My portfolio leaves absolutely no question at all about what I can and can't do, technically. I hear this a lot from software engineers, but it might be worth thinking about the underlying expectation that anyone should spend time poking through repos on the internet, why they would, and how hard it might be to standardize a hiring…

Because companies often ask for it! They ask for a link to your Github profile or portfolio, making people feel their GH needs to give the best version of them, and then completely disregard it. if you’re lucky it makes you pass some CV filter but you still need to jump through the rest of their hoops even though they have accepted the evidence that you can program.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#326

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #269
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've personally seen no correlation between people who can solve problems and program when watched by another person versus people who can solve problems and program when left alone with a real problem, and ample of time to noodle on and resolve it on their own. At most of my companies, we tried moving exclusively to take-home interview problems for this reason. Short problems that could be solved in 2-4 hours of t…

> Or we had people refusing to do the toy problem (not real work, same test for all candidates) unless we paid them hundreds of dollars to compensate their time. It's otherwise billable time, don't see why you'd have a hard time respecting that from a candidate.

> "It's otherwise billable time, don't see why you'd have a hard time respecting that from a candidate."

Sure, as long as the business gets to deduct the cost of the interviewers' time from that. Not gonna work out in favor of the candidate but respect is a two-way street.

After all, once the candidate (or a candidate, anyway) joins the team, it's their billable time being spent reviewing and interviewing other candidates too.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#327

Post by belorn »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #241
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works." I'm part of another online community that has a strong emphasize on social justice issues. These "just wing it" hiring practices are one of their biggest complaints about tech companies. There's a perception that the less well-defined and struct…

I have a very simple solution to this problem. It frequently evokes an instinctual negative reaction, for understandable reasons, but I truly believe it would be both equitable and effective. Ready? You want your company to be 50% women? Tell your teams that at least 50% of their hires must be women. That's it. To me, formalizing the quota but keeping the overall hiring process looser makes a lot more sense than the…

As a social experiment, I would like to see a town/province/state attempt to ban gender segregation in the work place by imposing quotas on all professions, especially those where the government itself is the employer. If you want a government contract in that town, the company must have a minimum of 40% men and 40% women for every role of employee.

I do not know what the costs, efficiency and employee happiness would be, but it would make for an amazing social experiment. Having 40% of the garbage men, sewer workers and construction workers being women, and 40% of the teachers, nurses, and social workers being men would make for a very different society than what we have today. There would be a lot of people trying to cheat the system in order to keep the work place gender segregated, but I wonder if that is a local maximum of happiness rather than a global one. Such study could shine some light and give us some final answers if quotas is a good idea or not.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#329

Post by BubRoss »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #310
missosoup wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there are legal issues with a quota (I'm legitimately not sure whether there are), then the law ought to be changed. That would be quite literally destroying the anti-discrimination laws which safeguard the exact thing that you think you're arguing in favour of. Quotas implemented the way you describe are the antithesis of equal opportunity. That 'instinctual negative reaction' you come across is people seeing t…

I don't think we need to have the same rules for well-represented and underrepresented groups. A reasonable person is fully capable of determining which is which. "Reverse racism" is not a real phenomenon in 99% of cases.

You are making decisions based on arbitrary labels and demographics, not on the person. It is the definition of descrimination.

Not only that, but it's blatantly hypocritical since you don't spend your money based on the demographics of a company, you spend it based on performance.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#330

Post by deanCommie »

throway1n wrote: post #266
deanCommie wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we want to find the best people at solving difficult problems with limited time, and maximum ambiguity. At a high level that reflects the work that we do. The project scale may be 20 weeks instead of 20 minutes, but the level of complexity is scaled accordingly. Of course, we miss out on some candidates that could be great at executing on a large timeline but can't demonstrate it in a short in person intervie…

this is so wrong i cant believe i am reading it. solving imaginary problems is not the same as being good at your job as an engineer. if google expects people to solve issues at a machine gun rate, it means google wants brick layers that lay bricks constantly. not people who need to stop and think about design issues over time. it wants workers to implement poorly sketched requirements and execute instructions on the…

Yeah, you're right, Google and Amazon hire a bunch of brick layers that can't design a long term sustainable system... Come on man
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