421–430 of 586 posts
I was laid off during the recession and was "out of shape" in terms of algorithm and interview skills. There is a lot to know. The two previous interview cycles in my career were a completely different experience. I could probably leverage my personality more - in the pandemic it was just a zoom call. Now I do regular practice problems so I'm always ready. I actually recommend this. It looks something like this: Sund…
I reviewed around 5000 candidates last year for TypeScript frontend and backend positions. Global, remote only. I received ~600 applications for an Angular position in one week. The hiring percent was below 0.5%. There are a lot of candidates, but most of them could not fulfill our core requirements a new team member must be able to accomplish. In our case it was TypeScript itself, unit tests, integration tests, work…
"Some candidates asked for an interview without completing the exercise. Unfortunately, this was not an option, as this would not be fair for the candidates who worked hard to get to the interview." This is just how I look at it, but if I reply to a company about a position, I'd like to know about the position before you make me jump through hoops. The exercise itself is okay, and a brief test like this is much, much…
I wrote another post for another position later which has more juicy details like country breakdown
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/angular-typescript-frontend-n...
Somewhat related, In the interview, the first question I asked if the candidates had tried to sign up on the website and what they thought about it. It is not encouraging if a candidate had not tried to figure out the company product himself/herself at all.
And once you pick candidates, bring them on board and have your behavioral/cultural interview to judge if they are a good fit for your team.
Will save time for both interviewers and interviewees.
That only covers a small percentage of the population. I used to fit that profile and back then, the minute I made any change to LinkedIn, I had people message me. Now people don't want to waste their time on someone that will be out of their price range or more experienced than their boss. FAANG is the exception, they seem very interested in scheduling an interview.
I think a lot of this is because our profession does not have an accepted universal bar everyone can jump over to be considered ‘qualified’. Every technical interview feels like rolling the dice in proving I am a competent developer. Giving me 50 minutes in a high pressure situation in an environment i am unfamiliar with and people I just meet will never product my best results, and then add to the fact that I could…
I think it's because software varies vastly in complexity and spans many domains. Every software engineering role may use a generalized skillset to a degree, but I feel like there can never be one all-encompassing bar that can effectively cover the requirements of every role.
Becoming a specialized divorce lawyer still requires you to pass certification on things like criminal law and constitutional law (among many other things), you won't be permitted to practice law if you know just your specialty, no matter how well you know it.
Becoming a heart surgeon still requires you to pass certification on pharmacology and gynecology (among many other things), you won't be permitted to practice medicine if you just know your specialty, no matter how well you know it.
But for software workers we do accept that you can ignore many related (and even relevant) fields and just learn only one niche of technology - we could make an all-encompassing bar, but it would be a major change and I'm not sure if we would want that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get the feeling that mediocre business should be able to run just fine on mediocre people. So it can't be that bad. Of course, every business likes to pretend they're the top and can only hire top talent.
A team of well managed mediocre members will be less of a headache and ultimately more value to a company than a team of rockstars. Besides all that, mediocre literally means average. You (collective) should be fine with average and stop overloading terms making general life more difficult than it needs to be.
Very few firms want to hire juniors, while nearly all firms desire senior-level talent. This manifests inflated job vacancies because so many firms have an evergreen job posting for "Senior Full Stack". Because talent is scarce these roles rarely get filled (hiring managers expect million-dollar candidates to accept $100-200k compensation). Also, because lots of software requires specific expertise, there are vacanci…
seems like a chicken and egg problem how are senior engineers supposed to be created if very few companies are willing to train junior engineers? Why aren't these companies offering paid apprenticeships if they are so desperate for workers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead we have to simulate work samples through whiteboard coding, pair programming sessions, take home coding projects, coding knowledge tests, etc. Very small sample size but we've had good results skipping coding exams entirely, and simply talking through some scenarios with candidates. - give them a hypothetical problem ("the page is loading slowly") and role play how they'd troubleshoot it - do they understand…
> - give them a hypothetical problem ("the page is loading slowly") and role play how they'd troubleshoot it - do they understand how different bits of the stack fit together? have they ruled out network issues before digging into the code? etc. I don't know. I think I'm pretty good at troubleshooting on the job (since I can be the one to troubleshoot & solve the trickier bugs) but thinking about doing it in an inter…
but thinking about doing it in an interview setting makes
me nervous.
Personally, if I was being interviewed, I'd really prefer this to coding exercises as those really crank up the anxiety for me. (But of course everybody has different preferences!)
not to mention that any serious production
bug relies on knowing how the software stack operates
& which things are relevant,
There's no right answer. We're just looking for their thought process and how they might look up and down the stack to zero in on something. Of course they would need to ask questions about the architecture along the way. We do communicate all that up front - it's their questions that we're looking for.
The rest seems fine, but I'm curious about your experience
with the live debugging & if you've considered cutting it.
I think that kind of exercise is good for distinguishing "recent code school graduates" who are smart and can write code for one or two parts of the stack, from more experienced devs who have experience understanding how all the pieces of the stack fit together in a production environment.
Because your premise is wrong. Software engineering isn't really in demand. It's a very dysfunctional system. I'm not even sure how you'd define "in demand".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the type of recruiter. If you're working with an external recruiter (like an agency recruiter), they're not going to do that. They'll just give you the client's expected salary range. I've never had an external recruiter play this game with me. If it's an internal recruiter, you might get that question. In that case, have a good idea of what you're looking for, and throw out a number at the top end of t…
Hm. Mostly what I expected then. With one exception: I am in the EU so here $120K a year does not exist. Not even $100K is easily achievable although I've commanded the equivalent of ~$90K a year and will soon work for the same figure. So I started wondering if I can pivot to the US market -- which was never a goal. I appreciate your advice. Insecurity and the impostor syndrome can hit even super capable people (I've…
The amount of money that actually gets delivered to a worker's bank account could be a little as 2/3 of their stated salary.
And many things cost more here.
It'd be a good idea to work the numbers and figure out what your take-home pay would be and how your expenses would change. There are some expat websites devoted to this.