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How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

blog.kuperate.com

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Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#221

Post by jandrewrogers »

selestify wrote: post #133
iancmceachern wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my point, folks with privilege like yourself don't even understand what privilege they have and have taken advantage of their whole life. I did (apply myself). I did work my ass off to get into, and out of, (good) engineering school and pay for it also. It simply wasn't an option for me to go to an expensive private or out of state school with a price tag of a couple hundred thousand dollars. So I went to the…

My family was so poor, I got into college for free. Talk about unprivileged.

Nonsense, you were privileged to be the right kind of "poor", the kind of poor that the system caters to. Just because the system gave you a big hand up does not imply that it does for everyone in equal conditions. You were privileged and you don't even realize it.

There are many poor people that are never given that opportunity regardless of ability. To those people, you had an easy path.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#222

Post by ziggus »

I've mentioned this before, but I think the conflation of 'developer' and 'software engineer' can really cause confusion when hiring. These are different roles that most HR, management and even most 'developers' aren't clear on. When you aren't clear on what a 'software engineer' actually does, and don't hire based on what that role really means but based on some other semi-related criteria like 'works well with clients' or 'bills lots of hours', you're going to wind up with a lot of confusion.

Here's the IEEE's take on the differences, based on their certification programs: https://www.computer.org/education/certifications

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#224

Post by iancmceachern »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #183
iancmceachern wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you had the privilege if uncommon intelligence and test taking ability. Not all privilege is money.

You're going to have to pick one between >>> So I went to the best school I could afford. Many folks are in this boat. It's not for a lack of trying or intelligence - it's for a lack of privilege. and > But you had the privilege [o]f uncommon intelligence and test taking ability. Not all privilege is money.

Not really. It's not so black and white. My point is that above a certain threshold of GPA/test scores/"intelligence" college is free. If you are below that threshold college is not. For those of us that were below that threshold, for whatever reason, we had to figure out how to pay for it. Within that bucket there are people who's family can just pay for it, no matter how expensive (these are the people going to Harvard and Wharton out of pocket), and there are those who simply can't afford to pay 200k for an education because they don't have it. Those folks then choose state Schools (which I went to and are wonderful). My point is that the average graduate of Wharton has a much higher average starting salary than the average state school. Therefore tying a family's ability to pay more tuition with a graduates average salary being higher.

It's simply the way the world works. The rich get richer.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#225

Post by iancmceachern »

selestify wrote: post #160
iancmceachern wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you had the privilege if uncommon intelligence and test taking ability. Not all privilege is money.

Too bad. Life isn’t fair. Evolution got us to where we were, and I’m glad that we have consciousness due to relentless natural selection.

I'm not complaining about it. Just recognizing it.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#226

Post by krinchan »

distrill wrote: post #156
heyitsanewacco wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner! I'm running a hiring competition right now for a "Senior." The pay band is less than what entry level startups pay. So we rotate through a never ending stream of kids who leave for better salaries because we don't have any higher levels. Sometimes we do get lucky and pick up a mediocre lifer (like me) so HR sees no incentive to change. Never take a job for a company where you are not…

> Sometimes we do get lucky and pick up a mediocre lifer (like me) why?

Because not everyone feels the need to rate their self-worth by how much wealth they’ve hoarded. I’m already set for retirement and I have my house nearly paid off. I’m comfortable and I don’t make $250,000 a year. I barely work more than 32 hours a week and I just got promoted. Full time work from home with a free working trip back to my old stomping grounds to catch up with friends twice a year.

Why would I break my psyche with burnout, stress, and work I despise just to make someone else exponentially more money so I can make marginally more money I don’t need? Miss me with that hustle porn, thanks.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#227

Post by commandlinefan »

metacritic12 wrote: post #172
robbyking wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive. Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you.

Could you just downgrade yourself without the company's consent? A upgrade seems fraudulent, but a downgrade...

I've struggled with that, having been in the same position - I was a "VP" at a six-person startup over ten years ago. Of course, I didn't anything remotely VP-ish there - I was programming computers, same as I've ever done. But, that was my title. So... do I write that on my resume and be honest about my title or write a title that's honest about what I was actually doing?

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#228

Post by trhway »

g051051 wrote: post #116

The apartment mentioned in the article stirred up some memories. Back in the early 90's, I worked for a company that had a long term contract for software development and support in another city. The team that worked on that project would rotate up and stay in an apartment that the company maintained there. While I never worked on the project and never saw the apartment, I heard many tales about it, which indicated t…

>management was shocked

after 30+ years in the industry whenever i read things like this the Casablanca always comes first to mind.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#229

Post by oriolid »

sailingparrot wrote: post #146
oriolid wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to have a co-worker exactly like you describe. He was great for consulting business: the clients liked him him so much that they hired two additional consultants. One to fix everything that he broke and another to do the job he was supposed to do and took credit for.

Statistics tell me two things: * A sample of one is not relevant * You also used to have many other coworkers that weren't very good at whiteboarding, since even very good engineering teams in FANGS have many people like that, and that didn't have that problem since you specifically said you had one occurence of that. So hear me out: maybe there isn't a single predictor that you can just automatically throw at interv…

I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me, but I can tell you that this ex-coworker would have been more convincing.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#230

Post by hnfong »

uncomputation wrote: post #42

This is another reason that, while I understand people’s complaints, I still believe CS interviews should include algorithmic and whiteboard tests. I know they may seem “outdated” or “irrelevant” to some, and yes, it is very unlikely that you will need to implement Dijkstra’s algorithm by hand without any reference, but it is more that it shows a general competence in computing which will transfer to other, more rele…

Agree on what you said. Whiteboard tests on textbook algorithms is a really efficient *and* lazy way of objectively testing a candidate's abilities. The nature of the questions will prevent the interviewer from mistakenly getting impressed by hyperbole.

That said, I do understand why people complain about algorithm questions -- it's undeniably a good filter if you have a large pool of candidates (and a reasonable predictor of ability), but it's mostly irrelevant to most software jobs today since you can usually import textbook algorithms as OSS modules.

The "correct" but harder way to interview is to tailor the interview questions to your actual requirements. This is much more involved and it requires the interviewers to divert attention from whatever they're working on just to set the problems. Setting a problem that's at the right difficulty level and evaluates the right set of skills precisely tailored to the team's needs is hard. (I don't think most typical software engineers have the chops to do this, even experienced senior ones.)

So it's kinda understandable that everyone just randomly picks something from leetcode and use that instead. It's probably not so much a failure of the software industry on the recruiting side, but more of a symptom of how we have failed to come up with skills, tricks, standards and practices that everyone actually agrees on. (eg. it's mostly fruitless to determine whether a candidate is hire-worthy with a question like "would you use Javascript to implement a backend system?") At least the algorithm questions are objectively agreed to be true (even if possibly irrelevant) by everyone and is actually part of most CS cirricula...

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