51–60 of 189 posts
You’ll need to get up to speed with modern interviewing practices. Unless you know someone - people don’t care what you’ve done. They care about how you perform in the interview. True with most of the top paying companies. I’d suggest doing a 100 problems on LC (try the subject study guides first) before interviewing again. Doesn’t sound fun but that’s how it is now. The bar is high for all candidates - at least for…
LC?
Some tough love here, from the parallel universe you. It was people like you in the late 1970s who inspired me to be a programmer (literally, talking to Hughes aircraft programmers on the bus to high school about the JOVIAL language), but one thing I knew by the time I was about 12, say, 1973 or so, was that aerospace engineering in the Hughes aircraft world was boom and bust. I did not learn programming until I was…
You’ll need to get up to speed with modern interviewing practices. Unless you know someone - people don’t care what you’ve done. They care about how you perform in the interview. True with most of the top paying companies. I’d suggest doing a 100 problems on LC (try the subject study guides first) before interviewing again. Doesn’t sound fun but that’s how it is now. The bar is high for all candidates - at least for…
I think OP is expecting a level of competence from interviewers that simply doesn’t exist anymore. He’s from a time when the initial conversation would be engineers only and absolutely focused on past projects.
Also over 50 (barely), skills are not exactly outdated (Azure data engineering/analytics), but been looking for a job since being laid off early in the pandemic (going on 1.5 years gap on the resume). Took a few months hiatus in 2020 since the job market was pretty much dead and got a few certifications. Just this month got 4 rejections, partly because of big gap on the resume (specifically mentioned in one of the rejections). Being older white non-veteran male doesn't help either.
What I'm finding interesting is how people surprised that it has been difficult to find a job if you were laid off during or right before the lockdowns. I don't think people realize how difficult it has been to find a job in this environment.
I'm also not observing "labor shortage" which is presumably the result of a "big resignation". Companies are taking their time responding to the applications and scheduling interviews, recruiters and HRs routinely disappear if you don't follow up, a huge percentage of my applications never get answered at all without a way to follow up (I only apply where I see some fit with my skillset), requirements are very specific and at times not realistic. Applied for a position which required min 5 years of experience with Azure Synapse which only went live in 2020. Another company was/is looking for BI director with experience in developing strategic roadmaps, setting up data governance, master data management, building and managing a distributed team, who also has recent 5+ years hands-on experience setting up new BI environment in Azure, designing the data model, building ETLs with Azure Data Factory, and building and maintaining PowerBI dashboards (I was deemed "not hands-on enough").
Tell us more about what you want to do. There’s a lot of people on HN who hire developers. Do you have anything you want focus on or do you pride yourself on being a generalist? Architect, team lead, or pure development of a system from day to day? And business domains that you’re especially familiar with or interested in? E-commerce, SaaS, aerospace, business systems, data engineering, etc. Give us a little more and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
WTF! It's your job to find people who can do the work. It is NOT the applicant's job to fit your preferred interview design. Talk about arrogance!
I take it you have never heard about the Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test (or similar) that every candidate has to take nowadays even before being invited for a technical interview.
Only counting those where i got all the way to the final rounds, my sample size is roughly 15-20. Not even once have I encountered anything even remotely similar to the Criteria Cognitive Aptitude test, and neither have I heard of it from friends of mine who were interviewing as well. I had a couple “take home programming challenge” things as a filter before the initial interview, but they were either leetcode-like or project-based, not some diet coke version of IQ testing.
With that in mind, it seems blatantly wrong to say that “this is everywhere these days”. Out of curiosity, what type of companies did you encounter that tested you with a cognitive aptitude test? No need for company names if you arent comfortable sharing, just curious about what type of companies those were (e.g., small startups or big tech or non-tech big companies or etc.).
Some tough love here, from the parallel universe you. It was people like you in the late 1970s who inspired me to be a programmer (literally, talking to Hughes aircraft programmers on the bus to high school about the JOVIAL language), but one thing I knew by the time I was about 12, say, 1973 or so, was that aerospace engineering in the Hughes aircraft world was boom and bust. I did not learn programming until I was…
You’ll need to get up to speed with modern interviewing practices. Unless you know someone - people don’t care what you’ve done. They care about how you perform in the interview. True with most of the top paying companies. I’d suggest doing a 100 problems on LC (try the subject study guides first) before interviewing again. Doesn’t sound fun but that’s how it is now. The bar is high for all candidates - at least for…
> people don’t care what you’ve done. They care about how you perform in the interview. I think OP is expecting a level of competence from interviewers that simply doesn’t exist anymore. He’s from a time when the initial conversation would be engineers only and absolutely focused on past projects.
No. OP has not realized that the job market has plenty of charlatans who can talk well, but can't do the job.
IME, many hiring managers want to see passion (desire to focus on the user/mission), drive (evidence you will work hard), and humility (ability to be a team player), in addion to technical skills.
Displaing corresponding negative traits can really undermine their view of you. For example, cynicism, ignorance/resistance to hot/new tech/approaches, lack of interest in learning on your own time, condescension for decisions they have made, disdain for the hiring process, etc.