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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”

#501

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

dahart wrote: post #499
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have a Medium page, with a lot of writing; directly about my development methodologies and process. I'm a good author. I've been writing my entire life, and come from a rather Ivy-league family (I'm the redneck engineer). I interview extremely well. I am empathetic, gregarious and genuinely like people. I have spent my entire adult life, getting along with some of the most difficult people in the world (long s…

I don’t believe it, you sound totally cut out to be a dev in today’s culture to me. :) If you’re experiencing issues interviewing, there are lots of things that could be going wrong. It might be the types of jobs and/or companies you’re applying for. You might be shooting slightly too high or too low for your experience level. You mentioned plainly that you’d work for not much money, that could (perhaps surprisingly)…

Never even gets that far.

What's sad, is that people like me used to be represented by a certain kind of recruiter, more akin to a literary agent. They'd beat the bush, and get a portion of the take from that.

Apparently, this type of job no longer exists. I suspect that the big aggregator sites, like monster.com and Hired are responsible for that.

It's been a rather sobering experience. At one time, I had to fight off people trying to hire me away from my employer, to whom I gave a great deal of loyalty. When they finally rolled up my team, I completely understood it, and supported their decision; even though it cost my team and I our jobs. They treated us well, and with great respect. I had issues with the way they did things, in many cases, but in the aggregate, it was a great experience that I don't regret in the slightest.

I've been shocked at how standard recruiters haven't shown much enthusiasm. They are the ones that get in touch with me, gushing about my résumé, then quickly backtrack, for...reasons. I know why.

I've had to concede defeat, eat a huge platter of crow and egg-on-face, followed by a dessert of humble pie. I hadn't planned on early retirement, but there you have it.

Edited to add: One other thing. I tried sites like Hired and Upwork, and the contacts I got were 100% (not 95% -100%. Not one single legit contact). scams -some, rather scary. I have heard numerous people praise these sites, but they were all people looking to hire folks; not be hired.

To be fair, many of the scams weren't predatory. They assumed that I would be fronting as an American programmer, and shopping my work out to Indian programmers (who were the ones contacting me). I suspect that some of the contractors out there may not exactly be what they say.

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

#502

Post by deanCommie »

BurningFrog wrote: post #494
deanCommie wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Inclusivity does not mean having to include those that would exclude others.

I don't mind excluding the odd violent extremist. But if you exclude all non leftists, that's about 2/3 of all Americans. And that looks very tribal to the rest of us. The mandatory brilliant essay on this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

How much of that 2/3 is college educated in the software industry, and is technically competent enough to pass the bar at Google?

But that's being overly provocative.

Ultimately this started with you saying that a question about diversity could be heard by some as a dog whistle that only leftists are welcome.

I simply don't agree with that premise. I do think there is a percentage of people who think diversity is a left-only issue, but I don't think that's 2/3rd of Americans. Then again, Donald Trump hovers around 50% approval rating regardless of what he does, so maybe I have too high an opinion of Americans.

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

#503

Post by Hydraulix989 »

monoideism wrote: post #469
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a misconception. I know plenty of people in Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, and even Pittsburgh, pulling in $200k/year in tech.

According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the median salary for software develors is $103,000. Top 10% earned $166,960 or higher. Take out the cities I mentioned and those numbers are even lower. If you know plenty of people outside of the major tech big cities (and I should have included Austin and Seattle in that, for sure) making over $200,000 year, they you have a statistically unusual sample of friends. A…

Base salary is only one portion (usually less than half) of total compensation. Also, these engineers that I am referring to do not have the entry-level title -- they are often "senior software engineer" or "technical lead".

Maybe I should revise my claim to "top software engineers make over $200,000 in Austin, Pittsburgh, Seattle, etc.".

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

#504

Post by Falkon1313 »

peter_d_sherman wrote: post #113
christiansakai wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, this won't work. 1. Too arduous for the FAANG company 2. If the end result is $250k/year salary, then absolutely insane amount of people will stick it until the end. I know I do. Heck, I will live at FAANG office 24/7/365 if I need to, and I know a lot of people will do it. See the current state of Leetcode forum and reddit CS career questions to get the feel of the type A people who flock there. It is go big…

I agree, it probably wouldn't work for the FAANG companies... I posted what I said as a note to my future self, if/when I run a software engineering company... if/when that happens, then that's how I'm going to handle hiring...

1) Offer the lowest compensation to attract the worst employees.

2) Pay them to spend several weeks taking tests.

3) ?

4) Profit

I'm curious what step 3 is?

Also you say that "The purists don't care about money as much as working with the right people." but you're intentionally selecting for the wrong people, so is this intended to avoid purists?

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

#505

Post by inertiatic »

tasuki wrote: post #406
omar_a1 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but what you've outlined above doesn't show that you value the candidates' time. You require two rounds of technical interviews before any human contact. It's asymmetrical. By automating the first two steps, you've made it so that you can waste as much of the applicants' time as you want without expending any further time or resources on your part. Also, from experience, I've never come across a two hour takeh…

> Sorry, but what you've outlined above doesn't show that you value the candidates' time. You require two rounds of technical interviews before any human contact. It's asymmetrical. By automating the first two steps, you've made it so that you can waste as much of the applicants' time as you want without expending any further time or resources on your part. I understand this was the goal. You can either waste your co…

That's playing the short game.

If as mentioned previously wasting candidates' time filters out the most competent people, then you're not helping your employer.

Also, I object to thinking that someone's time needs to be "wasted".

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

#506

Post by Falkon1313 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #152
gavinray wrote: post #42

Is it really that rare that companies have legitimate hiring processes and realistic interviews? Take this with a grain of salt, because my experience may differ from many here (never worked at FAANG, I spent a lot of time at smaller startups in Boulder and am currently in Miami) but I have only been put in front of a whiteboard one time during many dozens of interviews and it was a generic logic puzzle to see how I…

> Is it really that rare that companies have legitimate hiring processes and realistic interviews? In my experience, the gap between the HN comments section and the real world is massive when it comes to hiring practices. In the world of HN comments, most people tend to identify with the candidate rather the interviewers. The interview candidate is the hero, the underdog, and the person we're supposed to root for. Th…

>but I also had a number of "just trust me when I say that you should give me this job" type answers.

Is that really so far out? In many lines of work, you're expected to be trained into the position. My experience in software is that each company thinks they want someone who already knows X, Y, and Z, and can hit the ground running with no training.

But in reality, the hire will likely spend more time maintaining P & Q, and working on S, and will need quite a bit of domain knowledge as well as knowledge of the company's custom code and practices and internal organization before they're fully ramped up. And by the time they'd even get to work on X, Y, and Z, the company has likely moved on to A, B, and C, which almost everyone there is just learning.

It's a job that requires constant learning, and you're going to need to train your new hires whether you like it or not.

That's why when I'm called on to be the one asking questions, I mostly look for whether they enjoy learning and experimenting, whether they can have fun with old stuff and convey the differences between that and the new stuff (and why they're different), and whether they're open-minded or stubbornly convinced that they know the one true way.

That's the sort of thing you need when your old system has a decade+ of custom code and the dust hasn't even settled on the new system enough for the pros to know the right ways to do things with it yet. What you really need is someone with basic skills that's also open to being trained and learning new things.

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

#507

Post by mnm1 »

jlokier wrote: post #446
mnm1 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not have a better way, but one has existed for decades, maybe longer. Combine a personal interview with a company that's worth working for and you'll have no problem finding qualified candidates. This means one phone screen of about 30-60 minutes to both introduce the candidate and decide if they are worth a follow-up with the team followed by a one hour interview with the whole engineering team more focused…

> Whenever we want a great candidate, we go from resumes to hired in less than a month. A month is considered fast?! I guess as long as the great candidate you're hiring is not looking at other options. A recently saw a recruiter lamenting that their clients needed to be told that if they don't make a hiring decision within 2-3 days of introduction, they tend to miss out on the best engineers, who get offers from els…

It's not? Because I see people here complaining about open positions that stay open for months to years, or that they can't find candidates at all. The breakdown is roughly 1 week for phone screens, 1 week for main interviews, 1 week for the follow-up coding test / code review with a candidate, then the offer. So 3-4 weeks from start to finish. I simply don't see how it could possibly go any faster. We are still doing other work in the meantime. We also need to consider multiple candidates. More than a couple of interviews a day is simply too tiring to evaluate candidates fairly. I've never seen a company move any faster than two to three weeks in dozens and dozens of interviews with all types of candidates and all types of companies from startups to FAANG. Anecdotal reports from recruiters notwithstanding, I think it's incredibly fast. If candidates can't wait (we've had one that we liked that took another offer), it's not a big deal at all. There are tons of qualified candidates out there. Each time we've hired the last three times, we've had three equally capable candidates. If one of them drops out, it makes the decision that much easier. After all, at that stage, it's impossible to say one is better than another. That can only be said after working with someone for some time. We've even gone back and hired candidates that initially were our runner up when the first choice didn't work out due to non work-related issues.

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

#508

Post by belorn »

joshuamorton wrote: post #478
belorn wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want an example of general ban against discrimination you can look to the European Convention on Human Rights, in particular Article 10, 11 and 14. Political affiliation, political views, political association, all those are protected. The state can step in if it is in the interests of national security or to preventing of crime, but it is just as wrong to discriminate someone who identify as a feminist as som…

The right of political association is different from nondiscrimination. Are you suggesting it would be illegal for me to kick a nazi out of my store because they are being a nazi? Because that's the right we're talking about, my right to discriminate against you. It appears that you're conflating government nondiscrimination with government mandates on individual nondiscrimination. Those aren't equivalent.

> it would be illegal for me to kick a nazi out of my store because they are being a nazi

Here in Sweden, yes. The law is very clear that you can not deny service because you disagree with someones political, religious, or world views.

Government nondiscrimination is a US technicality of the first amendment. European Convention on Human Rights is not limiting to government behavior. Everyone has to follow it.

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

#509

Post by int_19h »

ipnon wrote: post #66

What is tragic here is the amount of effort that is now expended by young computer scientists into the game of algorithms. Whereas a young programmer in the past may have spent their extra days writing games in Basic or static web pages, hackers these days seem to do Leetcode until the wheels come off. We are failing to bring certain softwares into existence by effectively requiring programmers to their effort into t…

For what it's worth, the emphasis on algorithmic puzzles is a prominent feature of education for software engineers in Eastern Europe. And, well, there's a lot of good software engineers coming from Eastern Europe. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but it's something to ponder.

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

#510

Post by tonyedgecombe »

perl4ever wrote: post #465
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there is an element of truth in that. After all the people who are most likely to apply are those who are persistent but have been rejected by previous interviewers.

By not needing a job, I mean being your own boss, not just already having a job.

I see. I'm not sure I agree though. I haven't had a job for 22 years although I think that says more about my lack of ability to be a good employee than anything else.
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