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My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

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Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#251

Post by dominotw »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #250
dominotw wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think market now has moved on to leetcode DP/hard in ~30 mins. I got this in my last phone screen at tier 2-3 shop https://leetcode.com/problems/split-array-largest-sum/

Just did that one, didn't find the actual coding hard at all. But, just understanding what it wanted took a lot of time which would make me nervous, which would make me look stupid under the gun. I don't think I could do it confidently with someone looking over my shoulder, clock ticking, and $200k in sitting in a suitcase.

> Just did that one, didn't find the actual coding hard at all.

what what the time complexity of your solution? I failed the interview cos n^m soln wasn't accepted. he said hes looking for logarithmic soln.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#252

Post by dominotw »

vmception wrote: post #246
dominotw wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DP? Dynamic programming, for the problem I linked. Oh maybe I am having bad luck I got hit with another DP/Hard , https://leetcode.com/problems/word-ladder-ii/ at company called ' The Trade Desk' , which i believe is no where near Tier 1/2 tech companies. Exhaustive graph search ins't an acceptable solution.

what is an acceptable solution? what criteria does the acceptable solution solve such as computation time and space, or is that a factor at all?

Not sure. Thats what interviewer told me before he failed me. I am guessing he was expecting some sort of caching, memo soln.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#253

Post by cantankerously »

ativzzz wrote: post #245
cantankerously wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree and I think I understand OP's intent. However, if true that paints a fairly bleak picture. I'd like to find challenging work and make upper echelon salary, why not? Didn't go to MIT or similar and no FAANG experience. So my only hope is to create an open source project or blog and pray it explodes in popularity?

> I'd like to find challenging work and make upper echelon salary This has always been the case for humanity, that typically people who do challenging, high salary work come from wealthier families with access to better resources, including better social signaling resources to enable them to stand out from the pack. It's just part of the game; if you want to play at the top without being born into it, you have a long…

I guess my error in thought is that tech would be more of a meritocracy than other disciplines. I'm totally aware I have shortcomings. But you're right, some are better at playing the game than others for various reasons. I don't mean to be argumentative, just frustrated. Just like at the casino, if the deck is indeed stacked against me the best move is to not play.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#254

Post by mixmastamyk »

silveroriole wrote: post #104
t_1589165433 wrote: post #19

How on earth do people have these experiences? I have to submit multiple hundreds of applications to get one interview. Throwaway because it could turn into multiple thousands if that fact is linked to my identity.

Is America completely saturated with developers or something? If so how are their salaries still so high? In the UK I can safely say I’ve gotten an interview for every job I’ve applied for. I’m not an amazing programmer, it’s just that the general quality of applicants is very low (I’ve been on the recruiting side before). Yet I see this “I’ve sent hundreds of resumes” problem on HN frequently.

Salaries are that high because only 1 person in a hundred gets those jobs. Winner is a somewhat smart one, lucky enough to have solved the random questions the interviewers cooked up, in the last week.

Interviewer proceeds to imply the other 99 are morons. Some of them are, but all are unlucky.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#255

Post by jimbokun »

ramraj07 wrote: post #218
watwut wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90 hour a week means that the person is either not sleeping enough. Sleep deprivation means you cant be performant fully. Or the person did not had a single free day in weeks while working 12 hours a day. There are the people who do stupid decision just out of being tired. Just about the only way I have seen people work this much and not be overly tired drag was when significant bulk of time was spent socializing and…

Not sure where these numbers come from. I come from acadrmia. The expectation (and for the most part, reality) for someone in track to become a successful tenured professor is to maintain 80 hr weeks for a couple of decades if not longer. My professors maintain this still, it's how they live now. They have kids, but they had them when they're in their 40s after getting tenure. And they are not working below optimal i…

> And they are not working below optimal intellectual abilities.

How would you know?

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#256

Post by mixmastamyk »

dominotw wrote: post #251
mixmastamyk wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just did that one, didn't find the actual coding hard at all. But, just understanding what it wanted took a lot of time which would make me nervous, which would make me look stupid under the gun. I don't think I could do it confidently with someone looking over my shoulder, clock ticking, and $200k in sitting in a suitcase.

> Just did that one, didn't find the actual coding hard at all. what what the time complexity of your solution? I failed the interview cos n^m soln wasn't accepted. he said hes looking for logarithmic soln.

It could be improved yes. Earlier I noticed I only split the array into two and not into m pieces. So later went on a tangent on finding the best way to do that. But, I made the test case happy.

Also it says the length of the array is under 1000, so such an optimization is unnecessary.

The point though is that I probably couldn't do the basic solution with a gun to my head, much less an optimized one. One whiff of struggle and I'd panic and it'd be over at that point. I get very good reviews on my work under normal conditions.

Expecting an optimized, "original" work in a watched/timed environment is ridiculous imho. Interviewer is clueless and destined for failure.

I'll keep this link however. Next time a poor interviewer comes to me with similar I'll first state, I don't do 'swordfish' problems. If they insist, I'll challenge them to this one first. :D

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#257

Post by jimbokun »

cantankerously wrote: post #236
ativzzz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP should have prefaced his post with "If you want to make top 1-5% of engineering salaries". The vast majority of engineering jobs are done at boring non-tech companies by average programmers who have average educations and experiences. And of course, average salaries. Generally programmers working at those companies don't know about or don't care about HN.

I generally agree and I think I understand OP's intent. However, if true that paints a fairly bleak picture. I'd like to find challenging work and make upper echelon salary, why not? Didn't go to MIT or similar and no FAANG experience. So my only hope is to create an open source project or blog and pray it explodes in popularity?

> So my only hope is to create an open source project or blog and pray it explodes in popularity?

Pretty much, yes.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#258

Post by ramraj07 »

watwut wrote: post #243
ramraj07 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where these numbers come from. I come from acadrmia. The expectation (and for the most part, reality) for someone in track to become a successful tenured professor is to maintain 80 hr weeks for a couple of decades if not longer. My professors maintain this still, it's how they live now. They have kids, but they had them when they're in their 40s after getting tenure. And they are not working below optimal i…

> 80 is probably the sustainable maximum for any normal human. Not according to research. I know that academia features long hours. I never heard of academia as an example of efficiency through. Game industry is another hours high occupation (and the studies about crunch are from there). Also, having kids after 40 is not exactly advisable for women. You are getting into risk category health vise. People who work 80 h…

This was a couple lab, both professors were intense, but yes once they had a kid the husband started working from home more. But that didn't mean he worked fewer hours. We would typically take turns being on phone with him till 10 pm every day.

I'm not advocating it to anyone who hates this. I just want to say that I didn't mind it, I liked it as long as I was working on exciting things, and so did my professors and most other professors that I knew for that matter. My professors didn't have burnout or mental breakdowns, I didnt. Some of my labmates did though, and they quit.

I do not condone how my professors did things, they were abusive for sure. But that was fairly independent of the work ethic if you ask me. Most biology labs that went on to produce Nobel laureates or path breaking vaccines are similar.

Also please go revisit your literature on women having kids after 40. It's not nearly as bad as you might think it is.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#259

Post by ramraj07 »

jimbokun wrote: post #255
ramraj07 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where these numbers come from. I come from acadrmia. The expectation (and for the most part, reality) for someone in track to become a successful tenured professor is to maintain 80 hr weeks for a couple of decades if not longer. My professors maintain this still, it's how they live now. They have kids, but they had them when they're in their 40s after getting tenure. And they are not working below optimal i…

> And they are not working below optimal intellectual abilities. How would you know?

It's possible they could have been more efficient, but given what seemed to be their upper ceiling of intellectual abilities they seemed to be quite close to it. Conjecture of course.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#260

Post by int3 »

cantankerously wrote: post #253
ativzzz wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to find challenging work and make upper echelon salary This has always been the case for humanity, that typically people who do challenging, high salary work come from wealthier families with access to better resources, including better social signaling resources to enable them to stand out from the pack. It's just part of the game; if you want to play at the top without being born into it, you have a long…

I guess my error in thought is that tech would be more of a meritocracy than other disciplines. I'm totally aware I have shortcomings. But you're right, some are better at playing the game than others for various reasons. I don't mean to be argumentative, just frustrated. Just like at the casino, if the deck is indeed stacked against me the best move is to not play.

It's still way more of a meritocracy than many other disciplines. In what other field can you get an upper-echelon salary via non-credentialed routes like open-source projects and blogs?

Btw, you don't need to create an OSS project from scratch. You could also get visibility by making important contributions to an existing one.

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