Oh my, they nailed this!
With a rock? ;)
If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
11–20 of 69 posts
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#12This probably rings true for junior carpenters. As you progress in your career you are much more likely to land gigs based on your network. Carpenters work on projects together and want to keep working with other good carpenters. They don’t reach out to employers to apply for jobs — the employer reaches out to them!
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#13Unfortunately, this is the type of interview you get when you don’t do the god awful LC kind. I personally like the untimed take home + a conversation about the job. It’s not difficult to come up with a take home which can’t be “cheated” easily, and as a candidate I can look at the take home and decide at some point I don’t want the job that much.
I'll do a take home when you pay me my consulting rate to do it. Not interested in any company that isn't even going to take an hour of engineering time to give me a technical screen.
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#14The irony here is carpenters aren't generic. You don't hire "a carpenter", you hire a cabinetmaker, a framer, a fine woodworker, a cooper. It would be ridiculous to hire a framer for cooperage. Most people doing tech hiring are idiots. But most people getting hired are also idiots. So I think it all shakes out about even. If the results actually mattered, we would have some kind of industry wide standards, people wou…
Like all analogies, it's not perfect if you analyze it too literally. Hiring companies absolutely do ask about the "species of wood" though. I got some questions this week about how much I've worked with a specific product line of generic ARM CPUs, as if that matters.
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#15This seems like only 1 aspect of what's broken now. Interviewer: First, congratulations, out of the 13000 applications we received, our AI selected yours for further consideration. Now please take this test on the chemistry of lignin, and it's reactions. If you don't hear back with your results, it's because we decided not to persue a relationship at this time... After the test, we will ask you to build a mock tudor…
Good lord, where are interviews like that? Is it a FAANG thing?
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#16Very off-topic, but there's something very odd on that page. There's these meta tags:
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Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#17I really hope this article only represents a handful of companies and not a material percentage. My true hope is:
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Interviewer: We brought in some frames, please help me construct a part of a house
Carpenter: *bang* *bang* *bang* - *completes*
Interviewer: I noticed you did this but didn't true up the corners. Can you walk me through this:
Carpenter: While it visually looks more impressive, the long term stresses by forcing it to move the 5" causes it to break and needing replacement/repair within 4-6 years. Keeping it uneven is a better long term solution without sacrificing its load bearing ability.
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Or, You know... building stuff. (everything above is made up - i have no idea how to frame a house)
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#18This seems like only 1 aspect of what's broken now. Interviewer: First, congratulations, out of the 13000 applications we received, our AI selected yours for further consideration. Now please take this test on the chemistry of lignin, and it's reactions. If you don't hear back with your results, it's because we decided not to persue a relationship at this time... After the test, we will ask you to build a mock tudor…
If only this were hyperbole.
I once interviewed with a startup whose process was:
1. Pass TripleByte (already puts you in top whatever percentage of SWEs)
2. Meet with 4 members of the company for an hour each, and if they all like you:
3. Create a 15 minute presentation on some code you worked on. It can be code from a current or past job, but that will probably reflect poorly on you, so go build something so you can create a 15 minute presentation on it.
4. Deliver the presentation during lunch to anyone at the company who joins the meeting. Also, join the meeting via some pseudo video game in the browser that you’ve never heard of and probably won’t exist in 2 years (about 8 people joined the meeting, most of which I never met).
5. Meet with the cofounder for an hour, and if they like you enough:
6. You have the privilege of working for them for a week “trial” to make sure it’s really a good fit. You can still be rejected at this point, though if I made it this far only to be rejected, I’d have killed myself, so the fact that I’m writing this now should tell you I did not make it past #4.
For those curious, #4, my presentation was about how I reverse engineered the Robinhood API, spoofed requests to get around their “security”, and used two levels of caching (Redis and a typical relational DB) to subvert rate limiting/IP blacklisting. I don’t know anybody who has done something as remarkable, especially in their spare time, for fun. BUT, I apparently said or did something they didn’t like so all that is moot.
If carpenters had to go through what we go through… Jesus Christ himself could come back to Earth, apply at the Google of construction firms, and be rejected because of the gap on his resume. Ooo, sorry, that gap is a huge red flag. What’s that, you were murdered by Romans and it’s not your fault? Ehhh…. I don’t want to risk making a bad hire. Thank you so much for your interest though, we will surely keep you in mind for future opportunities.
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#19Insane. I could consistently sit in a room with a candidate for an hour, and at the end describe which positions they could handle, which would be a stretch, and which would be a fiasco. I ended up being a bit of a candidate whisperer.
But the truth is simply that if you speak clearly and listen closely, you'll learn more than enough in an hour. All this madness is to avoid developing these important skills. It's sad.
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#20Unfortunately, this is the type of interview you get when you don’t do the god awful LC kind. I personally like the untimed take home + a conversation about the job. It’s not difficult to come up with a take home which can’t be “cheated” easily, and as a candidate I can look at the take home and decide at some point I don’t want the job that much.
At least with leetcode there’s a standard, there’s consistency. You judge my ability to code by how well I know Djikstra? Fine, at least there’s only one Djikstra’s Algo, and I only have to learn it once.