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Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

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Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#161

Post by BoorishBears »

mrpeluca wrote: post #144
pkaler wrote: post #89

Hiring manager here with open REQs. I've been doing multiple phone screens daily, and it's been brutal on my end, too. I structure the hour-long phone screen to be 1/3 coding, 1/3 behavioural questions, and 1/3 career growth and questions for me. We rarely get out of the coding question block. It's a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily. The tightest solution is about 10 lines of code. It can be answered…

> We rarely get out of the coding question block. It's a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily. well I guess now we know why its all so brutal. We are being compared to a state of the art AI. Also we gotta have a compiler installed on our heads. That aside, if you are a hiring manager, ask yourself what your company really needs. Because this format of interview is so outdated, its insane.

I'm reading it totally differently. I've been giving an interview in a similar vein, and for years have been an outspoken opponent of leetcode for exactly what this interviewer is explaining.

We have a proper domain-specific programming test in the later stages of our pipeline, so my phone screen is a smoke test I expect most devs to complete in 10 minutes (we give the full 30 just in case).

We talk through a simple word problem, and at no point do I even require it to compile because I understand that not having your coding development environment choice can throw you off. At most if I spot an obvious syntax error I'll nudge to make sure they spot it and move on.

- Yet the feedback I get is extremely bi-modal: People who write code for a living love it. They had mentally prepped for inverting binary trees while some CS-guru stares them down over Zoom, so having a collaborative problem that takes the same mental process your day to day does is great for them.

But for people who have hyper-optimized for leetcode, it's like their brains shut down. Simple problems they should be able to solve with basic control flow suddenly become these insurmountable wall because they can't pattern match against something they memorized.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#162

Post by heavyheavy »

pkaler wrote: post #89

Hiring manager here with open REQs. I've been doing multiple phone screens daily, and it's been brutal on my end, too. I structure the hour-long phone screen to be 1/3 coding, 1/3 behavioural questions, and 1/3 career growth and questions for me. We rarely get out of the coding question block. It's a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily. The tightest solution is about 10 lines of code. It can be answered…

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#163

Post by pkaler »

recfab wrote: post #112
pkaler wrote: post #89

Hiring manager here with open REQs. I've been doing multiple phone screens daily, and it's been brutal on my end, too. I structure the hour-long phone screen to be 1/3 coding, 1/3 behavioural questions, and 1/3 career growth and questions for me. We rarely get out of the coding question block. It's a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily. The tightest solution is about 10 lines of code. It can be answered…

Is the coding question that is representative of the work you do at your company, and that you expect candidates to have done? Or is it a toy, "write a function that does X" question? "ChatGPT solves easily" suggests to me that it's a toy question. If it is a "toy" question, then I'm of two minds about it: On one hand, I am used to solving higher level problems, so it might take me a few minutes just to realize you a…

> Is the coding question that is representative of the work you do at your company, and that you expect candidates to have done?

The solution is a while-loop with a couple of if-statements. I would hope an engineer would write code like this many times per day. Whenever they need to marshal a blob from A to B.

> It also can feel just a tad insulting to be drilled on CompSci 101 questions.

I wish I had this problem! In these rare cases, I just say, "Great job! This was to just double-check you could write code. You'd be surprised how often a candidate isn't able to solve this! Let's talk about your career. In what aspects would you like to grow next?"

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#164

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

skyyler wrote: post #82
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, would be great to live in a magic land, where the US has no competitors, adversaries and sworn enemies. But this isn't magic land. US defense contractors are very much for profit and deliver a product that deters or kills some very bad people, more and more discriminating between collateral damage and intended targets - far more than can be said of Russian in Ukraine, for example. There's an entire generation i…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/politics/afghanistan-d... Anyone that gets into defense because of this thread, remember that the technologies you develop will be used to slaughter the innocent.

Dude, you don't need high tech to slaughter the innocent, any fool can do that. What gold-plated weapons systems do is credibly deter a Chinese landing force from showing up in Taipei, or help the Ukranians achieve the 5+ K/D ratios they need to survive as an independent nation.

I'd be happier to know that my code would let a shaped charge target a J20 cockpit in the unlikely event of Really Bad Decision Making, than to know that it was targeting teenage girls with contagious mental illness.

On the other hand, I can give you plenty of reasons not to work in defense. They don't pay enough for you to ever own a house in a desirable place; security clearances are an invasive relic of the J. Edgar Hoover days (and your sensitive data will get hacked by China anyway); it's assumed that you don't know "foreign persons" (hint: This is actually now a mark of the lower-class and uneducated.); a software engineer without an advanced degree is basically nobody; cloud stuff is mostly off limits; work may happen in windowless rooms; perks are non-existent; and it's embarrassing to answer "so what do you do for a living" if you're trying to exist in blue-state society.

But ethics? Compared to FAANG? I wouldn't worry about that.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#165

Post by BoorishBears »

recfab wrote: post #112
pkaler wrote: post #89

Hiring manager here with open REQs. I've been doing multiple phone screens daily, and it's been brutal on my end, too. I structure the hour-long phone screen to be 1/3 coding, 1/3 behavioural questions, and 1/3 career growth and questions for me. We rarely get out of the coding question block. It's a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily. The tightest solution is about 10 lines of code. It can be answered…

Is the coding question that is representative of the work you do at your company, and that you expect candidates to have done? Or is it a toy, "write a function that does X" question? "ChatGPT solves easily" suggests to me that it's a toy question. If it is a "toy" question, then I'm of two minds about it: On one hand, I am used to solving higher level problems, so it might take me a few minutes just to realize you a…

I ask a "toy-ish" question for a phone screen since we have a higher level coding section on-site. I get LC is the standard, but I've always considered how easily someone can adapt to be as much a signal as anything.

It's one thing if we paint it as Leetcode and then ask for fizz-buzz, but when I start the interview off by saying "no algorithms involved, we're not even compiling, it's mostly a way for us to talk about " and 15 minutes in you're still looking for a place to shoe horn in a hand rolled hash map, it might just say something about how your approach to engineering.

Many would argue filling FAANG to the brim with people who actively seek complexity is what has directly hurt their ability to innovate (and the fact OpenAI is full of ex-FAANG doesn't disagree)

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#166

Post by breakpointalpha »

TradingPlaces wrote: post #155

Large non-tech companies and government agencies still hiring. Walmart has 1278 job openings with “software” in the title https://careers.walmart.com/results?q=software&page=1&sort=r... CVS has 458 https://jobs.cvshealth.com/job-search-results/?keyword=softw... UnitedHealth has 625 https://careers.unitedhealthgroup.com/job-search-results/?ke... WSJ just wrote about this https://archive.is/2Ll06 Go down the list https…

Sorry to say this, but everyone in this thread should be aware of ghost job openings.

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/fake-jobs-hide-cooler-...

It's sometimes incompetent HR process and sometimes intentional market signalling, but these companies may just be stockpiling resumes for future use without any intention of hiring right now.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#167

Post by TradingPlaces »

breakpointalpha wrote: post #166
TradingPlaces wrote: post #155

Large non-tech companies and government agencies still hiring. Walmart has 1278 job openings with “software” in the title https://careers.walmart.com/results?q=software&page=1&sort=r... CVS has 458 https://jobs.cvshealth.com/job-search-results/?keyword=softw... UnitedHealth has 625 https://careers.unitedhealthgroup.com/job-search-results/?ke... WSJ just wrote about this https://archive.is/2Ll06 Go down the list https…

Sorry to say this, but everyone in this thread should be aware of ghost job openings. https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/fake-jobs-hide-cooler-... It's sometimes incompetent HR process and sometimes intentional market signalling, but these companies may just be stockpiling resumes for future use without any intention of hiring right now.

Walmart is serious, or at least I think they are. They had around 1700 job openings at the end of last year, culled that significantly in Jan/Feb. At that point there were about 1000 remaining, and it’s been creeping up again. So I think these are real.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#168

Post by pacomerh »

dhosek wrote: post #24
moosedev wrote: post #6

Not just you. I would guess, optimistically, I’m averaging a 5% conversion rate of applications to recruiter chats/“stage 0 interviews”. That is, ~95% of applications yield silence or a generic email rejection without any human contact. ~15 YOE, FAANG experience, usually only applying to roles I feel I’m at least a halfway good fit for (i.e. not a complete scattergun approach). I’m (financially) fine for now, which i…

Yeah, I’m about to hit 6 months of looking with a few final round interviews but no hire. It’s very discouraging. Especially when I see headlines talking about how the overall job market is hot.

> "overall job market is hot"

isn't it the opposite?. All I see is doom and gloom in the news.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#169

Post by gabereiser »

eschneider wrote: post #125
jselysianeagle wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems extremely counter-intuitive. I'd figure with so many experienced and talented people looking, it would be an employer's market and they'd use it to reign in pay at least a bit. Why do you think this might not be occurring?

I would expect that from the employer's point of view, it's not a sea of "amazing candidates to choose from, any of which would be a good fit for my company." When they find someone who ticks all the boxes, they can expect that person will tick the boxes for other companies as well, so best to make a reasonable offer that the candidate will take. Are average companies offering $300K to Senior/Staff Engineers this day…

This. You can try lowering your salary for the job req but you’ll end up with unfavorable candidates. So you go for the good ones and the good ones know what they are worth and are holding out collectively. Strange how economics works sometimes. Now, ask me again in a year.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#170

Post by gabereiser »

bobobob420 wrote: post #149
gabereiser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary… I’m not seeing any evidence of this. If anything, salaries are going up.

that is just simply not true. all evidence including anecdotal points to much lower salaries than we saw in last 2 years. Where and for which roles are you seeing salaries climb?

All the salary benchmarks. If you look at the trends overall (not entry level, those have dropped 4%, and not outliers, the $300k+ folks) compared to last year, it’s up. For how long I can’t say. I do think there will be a downtick in general for all folks but there’s still a lot of companies looking for talent. Whether or not they still have the budget is yet to be seen outside of FAANG and co. Most won’t know until end of quarter at best.

Not everyone had their chips in FTX and SVB. People are still hiring.

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