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Job Hunting in 2022
21–30 of 270 posts
Re: Job Hunting in 2022
#22Thanks to the author for taking the time to write this up. I think it is a fairly realistic description of what the process is like for an engineer who has spent several years working in Silicon Valley at a well-known company. The key takeaways, coming from someone with a similar background: * Rely heavily on your personal network to both identify worthwhile opportunities and for referrals which, in the Before Times,…
> They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight.
I honestly think I'd be physically incapable of doing this. I'm on the HSP side and even a single set of interviews is enough to drive me into an insomnia/anxiety cycle for weeks. I can't even imagine what this would be like for me. Albeit I admit it's the best way to get the job you want. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry...
Re: Job Hunting in 2022
#23Sounds about expected even in current conditions. If you are fairly skilled programmer, somewhat senior. These layoffs don’t matter. I assure you that you won’t die of hunger if you quit/are laid off. Plenty of demand for non-coasters.
Anecdotally, a large number of experienced engineers I know at big tech companies have been secretly hoping to be included in an upcoming layoff round.
So many people have mentally checked out of their current jobs but are too lazy to grind leetcode and go through interview loops. Unless you are in a financial crunch or have other issues like visa sponsorship, getting paid for 6+ months to fully focus on the next step of your career sounds like a dream.
Microsoft/Google/Meta/Amazon/Salesforce and the like are spending many billions of dollars and unknowingly setting up the largest startup incubators in the world right now (and getting nothing out of it in return).
Re: Job Hunting in 2022
#24That first impression (and how you tackled it) of system design interviews makes me question their usefulness. Like, how good of a signal can companies really be getting if it's too different from real world systems? Feels like an artificial wall too - many companies don't approach the scale where this stuff matters, so getting that experience is hard.
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Re: Job Hunting in 2022
#25On my last job search I found that overloading myself with interviews was very stressful. It's one of the reason I will no longer continue with any process that has take home assignments - at one point I had 4 different assignments with overlapping due dates. Far too much stress (and I was ghosted on all of them).
It's also not fun to be waiting to hear from the places you're really interested in while you've multiple exploding offers. One of the offers exploded before the date I was told it would. On the plus side I was able to use the offers as leverage to speed up the process at the job I finally did take.
If I have to do it again I will set some sensible limits on myself.
Re: Job Hunting in 2022
#26Sounds about expected even in current conditions. If you are fairly skilled programmer, somewhat senior. These layoffs don’t matter. I assure you that you won’t die of hunger if you quit/are laid off. Plenty of demand for non-coasters.
Anecdotally, a large number of experienced engineers I know at big tech companies have been secretly hoping to be included in an upcoming layoff round. So many people have mentally checked out of their current jobs but are too lazy to grind leetcode and go through interview loops. Unless you are in a financial crunch or have other issues like visa sponsorship, getting paid for 6+ months to fully focus on the next ste…
>unknowingly setting up
Wondering why they are giving such big serverences. Surely its not out of goodness of their hearts. 7 month severance at google seems a bit over the top to me.
Re: Job Hunting in 2022
#27That first impression (and how you tackled it) of system design interviews makes me question their usefulness. Like, how good of a signal can companies really be getting if it's too different from real world systems? Feels like an artificial wall too - many companies don't approach the scale where this stuff matters, so getting that experience is hard.
> Like, how good of a signal can companies really be getting if it's too different from real world systems?
There are "layers" to the signal you can get from system design interviews:
1. Are they aware of "big concepts", indexing, sharding, queues, scheduling, etc.
2. Are they comfortable actually using and manipulating these abstractions in an academic sense? e.g. new college grads may have never used an index, but can walk me through how we might use one to solve a given problem.
3. Do they have experience operationalizing these concepts? e.g. in DB design questions I love it when candidates are able to walk through a zero downtime migration plan from before and after we add a feature.
4. Related to 3, How do they weight tradeoffs in the system? Do they drill down into product requirements to help inform these tradeoffs?
A system design interview often lets me say: "They're not experienced enough at our scale for me to want to hire them at level X, but I'd hire them at level X-1"
All this said, I do think more companies should try to draw design interview questions directly from their own company experience e.g. imagine we didn't have feature X, how would you add it to the product?
Re: Job Hunting in 2022
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah if you're good and have the resume/experience to back it up, you won't have any issues getting great offers even in this market. Great candidates are not easy to find in any market.
This must be extremely subjective. Many times over I see very well qualified candidates spending months in this market looking for a position - when it took them weeks before.
Well qualified != useful for the role.
Re: Job Hunting in 2022
#29[flagged]
If you would be very successful in that role... but the company says no... that is a poor fit and is a reflection of their ability to hire qualified candidates to meet their real needs.
I'm confused why this is funny ha ha to you...Care to expound?
Re: Job Hunting in 2022
#30Thanks to the author for taking the time to write this up. I think it is a fairly realistic description of what the process is like for an engineer who has spent several years working in Silicon Valley at a well-known company. The key takeaways, coming from someone with a similar background: * Rely heavily on your personal network to both identify worthwhile opportunities and for referrals which, in the Before Times,…
> They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight. I honestly think I'd be physically incapable of doing this. I'm on the HSP side and even a single set of interviews is enough to drive me into an insomnia/anxiety cycle for weeks. I can't even imagine what this would be like for me. Albeit I admit it's the best way to get the job you want. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry...
This is incredibly common. I hate running interviews - we do the leetcode whiteboard pressure cooker crap - it's a policy I have no say in unfortunately. I've had candidates with strong backgrounds go to pieces right in front of me - it's awful to watch and I hate that I had anything to do with making someone experience that.
More people than you might imagine take Xanax to get through interviews.