241–250 of 270 posts
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You can take vacation or save some money before quitting. Or just do a few interviews per week while working like most people.
sorry kids, no Disneyland this year, I used up my vacation days back in Feb when I interviewed for a week straight
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With an attitude like that, you are richer than you realize.
100%! I’m blessed to be in the position that I am. But everything is relative. Some of my colleagues have it so much easier than me, because they went to school at Berkeley, etc. Started off their careers directly at a tier 2 company as interns! Got those sweet RSU’s at 22 years old. The goal of my reply was to encourage others and make them believe they can do it too. I endured some hardships on my journey (no conne…
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You're not getting roles at FAANG or most any place in SV without doing leetcode.
That’s unfortunate. They’re missing out on a lot of talented individuals.
I also had someone candidly tell me that they deliberately select for candidates who have put extensive time into preparation because that correlates with effort and the willingness to work under crunch conditions in the job. Gross, but effective.
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I think the problem these days is that it’s so hard to fire someone. I’m not sure if it’s legal, cultural or otherwise, but I constantly see coworkers who are at best useless and often detrimental being kept on and on and on. So the game becomes to avoid hiring someone like that at all costs, because once they are hired they are impossible to get rid of. I wish employment was more like contracting - you give someone…
Unless the person is truly a net negative producing programmer - firing, hiring (1-2 month process), onboarding, and then hoping they don't job hop tends to be even more expensive for an organization than having them plod away slowly. If they are a NNPP, gathering the necessary documentation and putting them on a PIP or shuffling them to another team is likely an easier path.
I think what might be happening is a vicious feedback loop of
* companies hiring too many smart engineers
* those engineers are in turn very bored and don’t have much to do so they check out
* not much gets done so more people get hired to do more stuff.
I think this write up is a good resource for those who got called into at least an interview. I wonder how does one improve if the rejections come even before a single interview? At that stage companies typically will not give you any reason for the rejection either for legal reasons or simply convenience. This leaves you hesitating whether to apply to other companies for fear they will reject you for the same unknow…
This is almost impossible to answer because there are so many reasons that it could be. But I've been hiring manager and looked through thousands of resumes/CVs and hired about 50-60 engineers. 1. Far under-qualified. People apply for senior positions with literally 18 months of experience ALL THE TIME. Seriously... ALL THE TIME. 2. Too many technologies on your CV. A lot of resumes will just list every language or t…
You absolutely can prepare for system interviews it’s just some of the best content for doing so is behind paywalls. I opted to buy a course on leetcode covering this topic and my performance before was like night and day. Going through about 20 worked examples each of which has a 45 minute explanation means learning about 60 patterns you can slot into various problems. Once you’ve seen the patterns it’s a lot easier…
What course did you use, if you don’t mind sharing?
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Unless the person is truly a net negative producing programmer - firing, hiring (1-2 month process), onboarding, and then hoping they don't job hop tends to be even more expensive for an organization than having them plod away slowly. If they are a NNPP, gathering the necessary documentation and putting them on a PIP or shuffling them to another team is likely an easier path.
That’s a fair point. I think it’s interesting that the bar for getting a job is so high, while the bar for keeping your job is so low. I think what might be happening is a vicious feedback loop of * companies hiring too many smart engineers * those engineers are in turn very bored and don’t have much to do so they check out * not much gets done so more people get hired to do more stuff.
First, many more applicants than positions. If you've got 100 for a single position, then selecting the best 10 out of that set will look like a high hiring bar when it is 'just' a "we don't have time to interview everyone." And many positions get many more than 100 applicants per position.
Next, the aspect of job hoping that has become fairly common in the past decade. If the average tenure of the person hired in the last 10 years is decreasing because the person can get paid more by switching companies then the other side of the push will be to raise the bar so that the new hire will require less onboarding and be able to be productive faster. If the company is using Kafka in house, and it takes two months to really get to the point of understanding it and the person leaves after a year, that's two months lost. So, instead hire someone who understands it and only requires a week to pick up the peculiarities here so that when they leave in a year you haven't lost a portion of the time getting them familiar with the tech stack.
Lastly, it is a pain to fire someone. You need documentation about their issues and that it is performance related and that its not done during a 30 day window where they've fired 49 other people and that HR is ensuring that they've got the CYA on a wrongful dismissal documented. And then, even when you do fire someone, you've got to go back and reopen the position and hire again and that takes two months from the time you submit the job description to HR to starting a new person along with at least a week of manager and interviewer time in the process.
The safest thing for a company to do is move them over to a team that does low priority, low impact things and never promote them in an engineering capacity. Note that sometimes when you move a person from a dev job to a QA or operations job you'll get the person coming back with constructive dismissal which takes time to handle.
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> you have the reason misconstrued I don't believe my post suggested any reasons. > it guarantees a reliable floor competency I disagree. FAANG experience only demonstrates that, at one point, somebody believed you could do the job. There are dead-weight employees at FAANGs (and everywhere of course) who don't really have much competency (or perhaps one very specific competency that's only valuable in that specific r…
> There are dead-weight employees at FAANGs (and everywhere of course) who don't really have much competency (or perhaps one very specific competency that's only valuable in that specific role at that specific company, and virtually nothing else). Sure, but if they were able to fool everyone enough to remain employed for a while (and didn’t depart on bad terms), then they’re likely to be able to do the same again, wh…
And in fact I have become very critical about people coming from FAANG when hiring into a smaller company. The problem is that they are often overestimate their abilities, aren't easily able to adjust from a big corp into a more dynamic, fast environment being hands-on and - which is the worst - don't see the problem with themselves but with their employer.
That being said, there are certainly brilliant people at FAANG. But most of those don't apply at smaller companies anyways. Leaving me with candidates that aren't a good fit, despite having a great resumee.
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Is the comp comparable to FAANG or is it a big step down? (At least in terms of liquid compensation) This is partially why I haven't been interviewing. All the big p(l)ayers have slowed down their hiring so much - why bother taking a role that pays less than half.
It varied, but I would say most places I looked at were comparable (or higher). there were a few places with lower comp that I was OK with (startups, or nonprofits).
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sorry kids, no Disneyland this year, I used up my vacation days back in Feb when I interviewed for a week straight
Given the choice of being able to take little Timmy to Disney world and providing him food and shelter and being able to cash flow him through college, he will get over it. Before you respond that I don’t know what it’s like juggling a family and I must be a fresh college grad, the 74 in my username has significance