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Job Hunting in 2022

mhlakhani.com

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Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#141

Post by Aeolun »

majormajor wrote: post #75
nsxwolf wrote: post #25

On 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 multipl…

I always thought the idea of a take-home sounded appealing, especially when I first heard of them ~15 years ago. The first time I found a bug in a company's take home project spec rather spoiled them for me. And sadly, that's not the only time that happened! A candidate who puts more effort into it than the person who created it gets rewarded by feeling confused or like they're missing something because it doesn't ad…

Hmm, yeah. I updated some assignment with a super legacy library to a new one, then got dinged for issues this highlighted in the original code…

Oh, and they took issue with the fact that my files were named in CamelCase instead of smake case.

Overall I think any form of take-home/leetcode is just depressing.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#142

Post by listenallyall »

> After leaving Meta recently

That's all I needed to hear. Back in the day, the college you went to opened (or shut) doors to get interviews. And most people, who did not attend an Ivy League school or similar, rejected the concept as being anti-meritocratic.

However, today, it's the same thing -- just replace college with the company(ies) you list on your resume. A shitty programmer with a bad attitude from Meta, Google, etc. is far more likely to get opportunities than the best programmer in the entire insurance industry, or the person who wrote the greatest dry-cleaner management software. It's quite unfortunate.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#143

Post by m0llusk »

Ninety minutes to do a thing. Evaluations are hard, but that barely relates to my experience as an engineer in any way. Couldn't they ask in detail about previous work instead?

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#144

Post by Aeolun »

nsxwolf wrote: post #56
dirtbag__dad wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you prefer a take home or a live coding challenge? I have the total opposite experience. I have rarely done well on a live code problem, I clam up. Tbh it’s humiliating, not representative of my actual skill set, and a waste of everyone’s time. The amount of time I’d need to study to be good at live coding is less than doing a couple take homes for companies I’m actually interested in.

The idea of a take home originally appealed to me, but my actual track record with them is very poor. They are usually too open ended - sometimes they'll say to write some service, that it shouldn't take more than an evening, and then you're left questioning how much they're expecting. Do they want a quick proof of concept? Do they want unit tests? Acceptance tests? Then there's the follow up - often a rejection with…

> often a rejection with no comments on the code whatsoever

Honestly, after getting a rejection with motivation 2 times now, I’m leaning towards rejections without motivation being better.

I just do not care to see how utterly arbitrary a lot of the reasons are. The basically come down to ‘you did some things I personally didn’t like’.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#145

Post by pandaman »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #109

In the job market right now. I have a question about talking to recruiters. I am talking to a couple of them, who are working with companies whose name or location they won't even disclose until the company looks at my CV and decides to move ahead. But the recruiters want me to specify a salary expectation. But my salary expectations depend on whether I am living in the downtown of large city or in a smaller city, or…

Tell them you are working with the other recruiters so if they don't want to double-submit (which invalidates the candidate in most cases unless the resume is so good the company does not mind paying double commission) they will have to tell you which companies they are submitting to. If they still refuse to tell - they don't work with anybody and just submit you to any open job ad they can find, you can do the same yourself with a lower chance of screwing up (e.g. the aforementioned double submission or the company explicitly rejecting any representation).

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#146

Post by dan-robertson »

listenallyall wrote: post #142

> After leaving Meta recently That's all I needed to hear. Back in the day, the college you went to opened (or shut) doors to get interviews. And most people, who did not attend an Ivy League school or similar, rejected the concept as being anti-meritocratic. However, today, it's the same thing -- just replace college with the company(ies) you list on your resume. A shitty programmer with a bad attitude from Meta, Go…

Would the person who wrote the best dry-cleaner management software do well at a company like Google? That is, I think a lot of the required skills there are ‘getting things done in a company the size of Google’ and having worked at Meta for a few years is perhaps a better signal for that than having made some great software. Likewise someone from Google may have a harder time in some startup where the structure is different and they don’t have all the fancy google tools or services. To be clear, I don’t want to imply that someone who makes great dry cleaner management software is a bad programmer or that they couldn’t be successful at Google or that Google look at the right signals and have good processes or that the startups who should have a different hiring strategy don’t copy google too much.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#147

Post by angarg12 »

turing_complete wrote: post #124
angarg12 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight. It's a grind, but you definitely get "in the zone". Additionally, setting this goal ensures that you are being properly proactive/aggressive in pursuing opportunities. As a married man nearing his 40s I can't imagine doing this. I need to keep my full time job to support my family, so just quit and focus 100% on prepping is not an option…

You can take vacation or save some money before quitting. Or just do a few interviews per week while working like most people.

Quitting your job to focus full time on prepping for the tech interview had a good ROI during the fever dream market of 2021 and 2022. I'm not so sure that's true anymore. At the very least it has an inherent risk (dwindling savings and not getting a good offer). Right now I'm more risk averse so I'd follow the tortoise approach by interviewing little by little overtime.

A pity since the TC game is played by pitting companies against each other in a bidding war. I guess I'll have to figure out my strategy when the time comes.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#148

Post by Aeolun »

Sodman wrote: post #39

I get that it's still a candidates market (especially for strong candidates like OP who can get 11 offers from 13 full attempts), but the spreadsheet of questions you should be asking a company linked in TFA has some eyebrow raising notes and unreasonable expectations imho. For example - there's a big pushback that any hiring manager worried about a candidate who don't have required skills they could learn in 6-12 mo…

I think there’s a difference between contributing, and being actually productive.

A candidate can get started on our stack fairly quickly, but it’d take months for them to understand the greater context.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#149

Post by Aeolun »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #123
dgb23 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best way to interview is to just have an experienced, respected worker or two ask some questions, which hopefully leads into a normal conversation about work. Talk about specific problems, nerd out about tech.

The counterargument is that this selects people who are similar to that one guy, produces inconsistent results, and doesn't scale up well.

You do it with multiple people? I find that the people we’ve hired using this method are fairly diverse (but I may be prejudiced).

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#150

Post by listenallyall »

dan-robertson wrote: post #146
listenallyall wrote: post #142

> After leaving Meta recently That's all I needed to hear. Back in the day, the college you went to opened (or shut) doors to get interviews. And most people, who did not attend an Ivy League school or similar, rejected the concept as being anti-meritocratic. However, today, it's the same thing -- just replace college with the company(ies) you list on your resume. A shitty programmer with a bad attitude from Meta, Go…

Would the person who wrote the best dry-cleaner management software do well at a company like Google? That is, I think a lot of the required skills there are ‘getting things done in a company the size of Google’ and having worked at Meta for a few years is perhaps a better signal for that than having made some great software. Likewise someone from Google may have a harder time in some startup where the structure is d…

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