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

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

#551

Post by exadeci » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 8:06 AM UTC

move-on-by wrote: post #213

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…

> In an environment I am unfamiliar with I had an technical interview with a company early last week, we did a shared session using VS Code. The interviewer wrote the function signature, and I filled out the implementation. I did great, according to the interviewer, and moved to the next set of interviews. The next interviewer, which turned out was also technical, ended up opening up a shared Google Docs to write cod…

Leave a review on glassdoor please

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

#552

Post by ozzythecat » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 8:11 AM UTC

moksly wrote: post #547

ozzythecat wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> decade ago my region of the country would produce maybe 50 fresh CS candidates a year, now it’s closer to 500 spread across multiple different educations. A degree is not the same as “talent”. The degree doesn’t even mean you really “learned” the fundamentals, so much as you were able to regurgitate information and pass exams. I’m a Principal at Amazon. One issue I see among CS graduates is a lack of understanding…

I don’t disagree with you but in Danish culture you get a degree or you work as unskilled labour in 99% of the cases. Even if you don’t “need” a degree you still get one because it would be a serious handicap if you didn’t and our educational system doesn’t cost the individual money. In fact we pay you $1300 a month for 6-7 years while you work on your higher education. I’m sure we could debate the system, but the re…

> the result is that almost everyone in CS/SE get a degree of at least academy level

But this doesn’t mean these graduates are skilled? From your explanation, it sounds like there’s an incentive to get a degree - both cash payments from the government and an opportunity to avoid labor work.

> as such the number of educated is a very strong indicator of how many new programmers are entering the field.

But “educated” in this context means they passed. It doesn’t mean all or even half of these graduates understand the discipline sufficiently to be productive employees or even work at a FANG tier company.

I guess my point is - the market might be saturated with these graduates, at least on paper. But that’s not the same as the market being saturated with talented programmers, engineers, admins, or whatever the job title is.

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

#553

Post by wink » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 8:27 AM UTC

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 the same in Germany as well (but I think the law has changed recently), but it highly depends in which field you work. I've never ever heard of such a thing in IT, whereas my wife is a social worker and it was pretty common to only get a 1 year contract at first up until recently. And if every employer in your field does it, there's not much else you can do.

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

#554

Post by adamauckland » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 9:52 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #108

nkingsy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In medicine you spend a decade making yourself employable. The on your own part is a luxury and a curse, in that we don’t need patients to practice on. The closest comparison I have is professional musician. you’re supposed to love the language of music. If you don’t, good luck.

The view of some that software has to be this all-consuming thing from a young age if you want to be any good at it has a great deal in common with the arts. And very little in common with how most people treat other technical professions.

Sure, because software is both an art and a science and draws a lot of comparisons with music where you have to understand the technical theory, the creative and also be comfortable physically playing an instrument while having some level of understanding the digital domain (MIDI etc).

Software also sits at this technical/creative/implementation intersection where unless you're doing something very specific, you're going to need to push/pull in different directions.

A lot of software doesn't do anything exciting, standard office CRUD, dashboards, back office tools can be banged together by a single developer as long as they can connect to a database, render a UI (web/desktop) and take requirements from the business.

There's a lot of software jobs which aren't at software companies but regular businesses who just need to track something domain specific and can't afford to tender.

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

#555

Post by lmilcin » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 11:08 AM UTC

sm1k wrote: post #529

lmilcin wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you assume it is I who are confused? Never had to "grind" to get any software development job I wanted even though I am always expected to demonstrate my coding ability. Actually, I wouldn't let myself be hired by a company that does not verify if their candidates can code. Too much of a drag working with people who can't pull their weight.

> Never had to "grind" to get any software development job I wanted even though I am always expected to demonstrate my coding ability. Good for you. Either you are quite gifted or you're not talking about interviews in FAANG or other similar companies like Doordash, Instacart etc. but rather other "easier" SF startups. I think you seem to be assuming two things: 1. Most interview questions are intuitive and one shoul…

If the exercise requires some kind of leap then it is a bad task for interview. For example: "please, implement A-star". On the other hand, better task is one that removes unnecessary leaps: "given this description of A-star, please, implement it". Which is what I try to do when I prepare tasks.

After all what I want to learn is how a person approaches implementing something and not whether they have good enough memory and luck.

If those FAANG companies do something else, it is their problem. There are so many companies you don't absolutely have to work for them.

The only reason they can get away with this is exactly because a lot of developers think either FAANG or bust.

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

#556

Post by randomswede » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 11:41 AM UTC

edoceo wrote: post #515

vmception wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are simply determining that you are okay with false negatives Which is exactly why they do irrelevant interview brainteasers as well This problem is a two way street in the tech sector, in case anyone wanted to fix it. The candidates alone are making the same mistake and bringing it to the company

Is a "false negative" a positive?

It is a determination that something should be rejected, when it really should have been accepted.

Similarly, a false positive is something that was accepted, when it should have been rejected.

If you have a sufficiently high candidate pool. you can (for a while, at least) live with an interview process with a relatively high false negative rate (that is, x% of the time you don't hire people you should have).

If it is typically quick to go from "in through the door" to "is a productive member of the team", it may be that you can live with a high false positive rate (that is, y% of the time you hire people you shouldn't have).

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

#557

Post by randomswede » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 11:55 AM UTC

herbturbo wrote: post #238

bschwindHN wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're too busy writing self congratulatory blog posts on their hiring process to have time to improve it. https://alexgolec.dev/reddit-interview-problems-the-game-of-...

It's a good signal for me when I'm presented with silly brain teasers like this in interviews, especially when the technology of the company isn't that great. I'm interviewing you too, so give me something that reflects the problems you solve as a team, otherwise my assumption is your office is full of white boards containing puzzles of the day and your tech is all 3rd party libs.

I wouldn't actually class this as a brain-teaser. It is a non-trivial[1] problem that doesn't require an "aha!" moment to get right. It is amenable to multiple ways of reaching a correct solution. It has interesting follow-up questions. It also stands a minimal chance to actually discover (some) of the way a candidate thinks. It is also implementing the VM for a Turing-complete computational model.

It may also be that anything work-related is actually too long to fit into a limited interview time.

Now, a trivial, brain-teaser, question would be "you have an NxM matrix, and you can either go left or up. How many paths are there from the lower left, to the upper-right corner?"

I consider it a brain-teaser because if you write code that contains any matrix manipulation or searching, you have basically failed. There is a closed-form expression for the number, so...

[1] By "non-trivial", I basically mean that there are multiple correct solutions.

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

#558

Post by JohnBooty » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 11:57 AM UTC

wintermutestwin wrote: post #449

msie wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"tell us about a tricky technical challenge you solved" I have so much trouble remembering previous challenges I've overcome. I don't ruminate on them, I just move on...

Yes, I have found that this question just selects for people who can recall well on the spot, or worse, can make up some a believable canned war story and articulate it well. As such, it is really testing a particular set of social skills which have minimal bearing on an engineer's ability to do their job.

    it is really testing a particular set of social skills

I need my engineers to have strong communication skills, so this is intentional and desired.

    ...which have minimal bearing on an engineer's ability to do their job

In positions I've held, communicating and remembering are pretty desirable qualities. For engineers and others. I need my engineers to be able to do those things. You obviously don't. That's fine. We'll hire different engineers. Everybody wins.

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

#559

Post by kamaal » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 12:01 PM UTC

mateo411 wrote: post #190

serf wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've had similar experiences over the phone. "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" me : "What kind of data? What is it used for? How should it be represented afterwards?" Silence on the other end , followed by "Well that's up to you." I then fumble out a few ways to do it (verbally), to a recruiter that doesn't seem to understand anything that i'm say…

> "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" The answer to this question is to use a generator. If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back. Is this a good question? If you want somebody with a lot of Python expertise, then knowing about generators is a good thing. If I was interviewing a candi…

>>The answer to this question is to use a generator.

Wrong answer.

The heap data structure would be a right way to go about representing such data.

>>If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back.

Same in your case now.

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

#560

Post by randomswede » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 12:02 PM UTC

hirvi74 wrote: post #530

steelframe wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I've never even heard of a Bloom filter, so I know how I would have done.

Bloom filters are really cool for space-efficient "have I never seen this before?" lookups. If that is a question that code you write frequently have to answer, Bloom filters may be a good choice. The Wikipedia page actually seems as if it's not too horrible,