301–310 of 470 posts
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The vast majority of working engineers don’t bother with PE certifications.
But most of them do have to pass the FE to work under the title of engineer. Simply graduating isn’t usually enough.
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There’s also a lot of people that think the world owes them something. Why do they owe you a response? OP agreed to do an assignment did but did they get the company to agree to call them back on a set date? A good job is like a hot girl they don’t have time to text back all the rejects
OP spent 6 hours of his time on an assignment requested by the company. This goes beyond basic human decency, so he is OWED that someone puts 2 minutes of their time and sends a short e-mail. Asking someone to do so much work for you and dismiss them is a dick move in any culture.
According to the HN gestalt, you shouldn't do a whiteboard interview because that's too unrealistic because nobody programs on a whiteboard, you shouldn't expect programmers to code with their laptop in an interview because that's too much pressure and also unrealistic, you shouldn't expect programmers to be willing to do a take home exam because that's too much work without money (and if people did pay, the complain…
then (or instead) we might do the opposite: I should have a project on github (or similar) that you can look at beforehand, let you pick an issue, etc etc
if the issues are 6 hours issues, the commitment is on both sides: the company has a team member spending those 6 hours too
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>no-one complains about -- a take-home piece of work paid at a reasonable rate. I've seen multiple comments in past HN threads of programmers complaining about any after-hours coding homework (even if paid) because "they have kids and don't have time or energy for that" . Probably the only suggested interview method that gets the fewest complaints from candidates is the "let's have a casual chat and just shoot the br…
> they have kids and don't have time or energy for that I don't have a lot of sympathy for this argument. If they have time to take half a day to go to an interview, then it doesn't seem like it should be much different to take half a day to work on an interviewing problem.
But a lot of companies use the multi-hour coding homework as a preliminary filter before asking the candidate to take the "next step" to the half-day onsite interview.
The coding homework is asymmetric work because the company doesn't have to expend their existing employees time on prospective candidates. In fact, a lot of companies let recruiters coordinate the coding homework so their existing employees spend the least amount of time on it.
The onsite interview is more symmetric effort because both the interviewer and the candidate have to expend time together. There's a bit more commitment on the part of the company doing the hiring.
I'm not complaining. Just stating how the different perspectives play out.
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> I've worked on a couple of teams that hired solely on the "strength of the résumé," > We realized they were just good interviewers It sounds like they didn't hire solely on the strength of the résumé, because then wouldn't interview performance be irrelevant? In contrast, there are people with strong résumés who don't interview well, regardless of the interviewing method. > The two people I know we hired on that ba…
Good luck hiring and then firing incompentent people (and there are many such "programmers") at scale. At least by making interviews hard you're not putting families at risk which you would by hiring people to fire them with pretty high odds.
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> Because nearly every other industry is credentialed, so proving your 3-8 years of university grind is enough to get hired. Nearly every other industry is credentialed and a degree is enough to get hired? I don't think that matches reality at all.
Lawyers need to have passed the bar. Accountants need their CPA. Doctors their MD. Pharmacists their Pharm.D. Finance professionals their CFA. And so on. Software engineers making 150K with only a four year degree and some leetcode have nothing to complain about. Take homes? Whiteboards? Cry me a river. Try to pass the bar or get through residency instead.
https://www.ordemengenheiros.pt/pt/a-ordem/colegios-e-especi...
Problem is people calling themselves engineers without being one.
I've interviewed maybe 500 engineers in my career. I'm an early engineer of Instacart, 3rd engineer of Eventbrite, founding engineer of Reforge. Started 3 companies myself.
My interview is always the same:
1. Bring code you've written
2. Share your screen
3. Explain what it does and I will casually ask questions about it
You get so much information from this:
- How they think about code
- If they think it could be better
- Who they blame if the code isn't the best
- Personality
- Product dev glimpses
- Comms
- Sentiment
I'd be okay with "homework" if either 1) it's truly time bounded via programmatic cutoffs or 2) it's paid. For time bounding, I love the time estimates they give you for a decent sized problem. A major company told me that a feature extraction problem + report should only take 4 hours. They provided me with some large CSVs representing DB tables (which contained some malformed data) and wanted a brief report back. Th…
That's interesting because as a hiring manager I get a lot of push back on our take-home since it does cut you off after a certain amount of time. Our take home shouldn't take more than 90/120minutes, we give candidates up to 4 hours just because some really like to polish, but then that's it. I don't want them to spend more of their spare time on that. The feedback is usually "well, but I want to make sure I can tak…
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And if you've been working on proprietary things for those 20 years and don't work on your own open projects at home--as would be considered utterly unremarkable if you were a chemical engineer for example--you wouldn't have a portfolio. Yes, if you're a photographer I'd expect to see a portfolio. But that's not true for basically the majority of technical, scientific, and business fields.
The chemical engineer has an engineering degree. They are possibly also a professional engineer. To retain the PE license, continuing education is a requirement. > Chemical engineers must, on average, complete 15 hours of technically focused continuing education courses each year. State requirements vary, and some also require courses on ethics, state engineering laws, or professional behavior. Acceptable formats inc…
Continuing education is a bit of a joke. So you attend a conference once a year, maybe watch some webinars. In general, PEs mean you've gotten an undergrad degree, passed a couple of GRE-type tests and have worked in the industry for a few years.