Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

betterprogramming.pub

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 586 posts

Re: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

#491

Post by dandersh »

Looking seriously for the first time in a few years and it's shocking how much worse the process has gotten.

I did a technical, live coding screen for 45 minutes. It went well enough that they were interested in moving forward. 4, one hour long technical interviews and another hour with management, all spread out over the course of a day. I'm already working full time with a family and I'm expected to burn through an entire day of PTO? And to add to it there was no response as to what would be covered during these 4 separate technical interviews.

What's really maddening is that it's our fellow software engineers that are doing this to us. We're the ones that think it's okay to do "take home assignments" and essentially work for free. We know how awkward and stressful live coding exercises are but yet we do them. We value our time and work/life balance but yet think it's okay for every candidate to go through 3+ hours of interviews.

The one thing that's helped keep me sane through all of this was having watched Jem Young's Frontendmasters course "Interviewing for Front-End Engineers".

Re: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

#492

Post by draw_down »

steelframe wrote: post #191
Nbox9 wrote: post #13

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…

The first time I interviewed at Google I didn’t make it past the phone screen. I bombed a question about an appropriate length of a Bloom filter because I hadn’t recently been thinking about Bloom filters, and I was summarily rejected for onsites. The second time I interviewed I was asked a number of questions that I was perfectly “primed” to answer. Because those were in my brain’s cache, I was able to get through t…

Sounds like the system works!

Re: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

#493

Post by dandersh »

jaaron wrote: post #473
hogFeast wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense because, presumably, the alternative is to have no-one. If you don't hire someone because you are worried about the team, you don't need to hire anyone (this risk is, also, not avoidable anyway...if your product is so fragile, the risk isn't making a hiring mistake).

Most small to midsized organizations would prefer to deal with false-negatives during hiring (missing out on good talent) than the issues of false-positives (bad hires). Often times (not always) no one is preferable to a bad hire. A bad hire can set everything back significantly more. Not only do you have to deal with new missed deadlines or poor quality work, but you often have to deal with the fallout with team mem…

I'm leaving my current role due in part to them not hiring other devs efficiently, resulting in a long-term unsustainable workload and everything that it entails.

The final straw was during a meeting when it was brought up that they were using take home projects to evaluate candidates. We're drowning in work and you're delaying us adding resources AND wasting bandwidth on take home projects? Not to mention wasting that candidates time and contributing to the "all hours" mentality that made the job miserable for me to work in.

Re: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

#494

Post by hogFeast »

Banana699 wrote: post #478
hogFeast wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed for a front-end dev position (it was my first ever interview in the industry, I vomited before I got there so it was a pretty crazy day). I come in. The front-end guy starts asking me questions to try and solve something he is working on. No-one else is there yet. He is asking me about why a JS compiler is removing his comments, I say I don't know, I have never had that issue before...I make an off-hand…

>He is asking me about why a JS compiler is removing his comments Huh ? language parsers remove comments because they're comments, that's literally by definition. Are you (or your past interviewer) using "comments" in a different sense ? (Also, not trying to be a pedant on you I swear, but technically JS is traditionally interpreted. Most mature runtimes have compilers but it's not part of the API. It's just a juveni…

I actually can't remember the details. I believe we were talking about Babel...so, technically, a transpiler. Or it actually could have been one of those code bundlers (I seem to remember they were using browserify...this was a while ago but I believe most people were already using webpack then...JS...what a mess).

Actually can't find him at the company anymore. But the company isn't doing too well (although they seem to have moved into a nicer office). Revenue down 50% last year (from a small number to an even smaller number), costs up 60%, losing substantially more money than they have revenue, the operations guy who did my interview isn't there anymore either...true "tech company things". I didn't the impression that the company was that bad, they were more "much steam, no fire".

Re: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

#495

Post by gbear0 »

hogFeast wrote: post #434
addicted wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of a bad hire is extremely high. It's not their salary or bonus, etc. It's how they can affect a team, the product, and the deliverables.

That makes no sense because, presumably, the alternative is to have no-one. If you don't hire someone because you are worried about the team, you don't need to hire anyone (this risk is, also, not avoidable anyway...if your product is so fragile, the risk isn't making a hiring mistake).

I think you'd be surprised. For example, with the wrong hire, one person with bad behaviour could frustrate everyone else on the team to the point where no one wants to work on the project anymore. This could lead to the whole team feeling resentment for one reason or another, and eventually leaving. Now you're in need of a lot more devs.

Re: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

#496

Post by lbreakjai »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #480
debarshri wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but here in Netherland, you can give out 3, 1 year offers before you forced to give a permanent contract.

>True, but here in Netherland, you can give out 3, 1 year offers before you forced to give a permanent contract. I guess this just sounds weird to me. I would have to be pretty desperate to take a 1 year contract from a company that only paid me full-time wage as opposed to a contractors wage. I have to assume the Netherlands has a lot of developers seeking employment for this to work.

It's pretty much the standard across all industries. It's extremely difficult to get rid of an "indefinite" employee, so most roles will start with a first fixed-term contract.

You don't really get any less security than in a country like the U.K, where you can't claim unfair dismissal under two years of service.

Re: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

#497

Post by gscott »

tomkat0789 wrote: post #38

Slashdot had a post about this topic a few years ago that I thought was colorful enough to save for posterity: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/18/03/14/1428242/deman... The top comment seemed to capture the problem best: "What is in extremely high demand is programmers with 20 years of experience in a technology that has been around for 5, no older than 19 and working for 20k a year. And that demand will be hig…

This is often done to hire H1b applicants. You run the local applicants through an interview that ends up with them even if they are qualified not taking the job then go and hire the H1b that you really wanted because the H1b is then dependent upon you for staying the United States. You can now hold that over the person and anything you want they have to do like working 100 hours a week.

Re: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

#498

Post by Justsignedup »

Personal advice from going on and giving a total of at least a hundred job interviews in my years:

- no matter how desperate the situation, always treat an interview as a date -- you might meet some really interesting people, you might hear some interesting things, learn how different people think about problems. Or it might really suck and you can't wait to leave. This attitude works amazingly well. If you are happy to be there and talk, you'll have a good time, they'll have a good time, they'll like you, you win.

- always think about how would YOU interview yourself. What info is useful for you to interview someone for 30 minutes and make a decision. Shadow some interviews. Your literal job as an interviewer is to get an understanding of the candidate. If you know what they want to know, just focus every word on giving them that answer. Any interview I ran where everything I was gonna follow up the interviewer mentioned intentionally, I was like "wow, okay cool you really answered everything I wanted to know, let's move on" and those interviews are really the best with time to just chit chat and get to know the person. This is also useful for understanding why they ask you questions, asking clarifying questions to make sure that you understand what they're looking to get out of you. There's nothing worse than losing 5 minutes to someone talking about something completely pointless during a 30 minute interview. "Tell me about a time you failed." "Oh I have plenty of those, but are you looking for say a failure with my team, or a time I crashed production, or when a project got really late" doing such a prompt instantly makes the question easier for you AND makes you look 100x better.

- coding is a tricky one. 90% of the companies want you to code an okay solution, but they mainly want to see how you _think_. Like who cares if I can sort a billion numbers in memory in O(1) time, write a paper and move on with life, if I can't explain it to anyone I am useless to the team. Code out loud, just slowly solve whatever problem, and talk about the problems you're trying to tackle, what is important, what is not. If you mumble make sure to create "okay, I have a solution, I can walk you through it" because mumbling = they disengage. If you explain your strategy, it makes you look better AND if your strategy is flawed, the interviewer will often help or prompt "I really want to help but this is what I really want you to solve" and now their cards are on the table, you know what they want (see previous point).

- learn to whiteboard at least a bit. You need to be able to explain your thoughts to other engineers. Sometimes pulling out a whiteboard is an amazing way to do it. Yeah its cliche but it really is a practical skill.

- If the interview requires you to solve a complex mathematical problem perfectly on the spot or get out, you're either interviewing for FAANG (and have studied for a month or 3) or you probably don't wanna work there.

Re: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

#499

Post by Matthias247 »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #169

It's because in software engineering your work product is confidential/proprietary and work samples take a very long time to produce. If you could review someone's code from their previous jobs, I think it would be quite easy to vet applicants. And it would be much easier to move from job to job. Instead we have to simulate work samples through whiteboard coding, pair programming sessions, take home coding projects,…

I disagree on 2 points:

> It is much easier for product designers and product managers to pass interviews. You can see their work product.

You don't see any more work of a product manager than of an engineer. What you see is always the finished product, and you have no idea who contributed what parts. If the overall product that can be publicly experienced is good, then some engineers in that team seem to have been doing a good job. You won't easily know which ones - and you especially don't know whether a product manager on the team really a lot of influence on this or whether the products vision and execution was mostly driven by engineers.

And the second point:

> If you could review someone's code from their previous jobs, I think it would be quite easy to vet applicants. And it would be much easier to move from job to job.

Sometimes employers can - because candidates have open source code. But experience has shown that these datapoints are not used, and employers still fall back to the default process of assuming nothing and doing whiteboard/leetcode style interviews.

Re: If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

#500

Post by bonestamp2 »

zoomablemind wrote: post #368
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 minutes? Not even an hour? I'm a senior and I need an hour to work my way through deep questions (not just technical) to see what real-world experience the candidate has while simultaneously judging cultural fit. I prefer an hour and a half to allow time for the candidate to feel more comfortable and come up with their own questions. I definitely agree with the taking risks part. Hiring should not be about the mos…

> ...to see what real-world experience the candidate has while simultaneously judging cultural fit. Could you expand on how do you evaluate the cultural fit?

Not OP but I often ask people their opinion on things (work/project related of course). I'm hoping to find some part of our domain where we disagree, to see how well they can have a civil discussion about something where we don't agree. To fit in on our team, everyone needs to be able to have mature discussions when we don't agree because disagreements happen a lot (and we end up with a better solution when we talk through them).
Post reply on HN