151–160 of 322 posts
> All recruiters I was in contact with asked for my CV, even though it is mostly the same information that is already on my LinkedIn profile. It is almost as if it is a sign that you are serious. I think it's a token that they can forward to an employer, establishing some degree of your consent to them representing you. (Like in a story of visiting some foreign culture, when someone offers you tea they made in some f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Snowpocalypse/snowmageddon. 2010 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_5%E2%80%936,_2010_N... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_25%E2%80%9327,_2010... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_25%E2%80%9327,_2010... Two back to back storms, there was about 12 hour window where you could get in or out. This poor guy was supposed to fly back during the first, got pushed to a flight during the second, and then…
I’m familiar with travel in that storm. It sounds like they didn’t really make an effort. They _didn’t_ get back, which is different from they _couldn’t_ get back. Which is probably why they got fired. Overall, though, it doesn’t change your original point about interviews, and I didn’t really need to take us on this tangent.
How did Sweden get like that?
Anecdotally I've noticed that while the job market isn't good for software engineers, its seems to be much much worse for all the supportive roles like eng managers/product managers/designers/dev rel/ etc. In my circle these seem to be the people who have been really struggling to find work, whereas the devs do seem to be finding work (just at a slower pace and with worse benefits than before.) Is this just my bubble…
A lot of this is the pervasive management trend that there is too much management, like how Instagram just eliminated the entire role of Technical Program Manager.
So at Job 1, the layoffs were about 50% “management.” My team no longer has a product manager and we have been told not to bother fussing over design except for big things. Both roles were essentially folded into team lead. He has to make mockups and product decisions now.
At Job 2, the layoffs were 70% management. My team had a manager who went from leading one team of 5 to four teams totaling 25. We also lost our designer and a product owner (we had several), and those decisions are now on the other product owners or the technical team lead (not management at this role).
Why on earth is the standard notice 3 months but the company can let you go instantly? How did Sweden get like that?
There's a probationary period, usually a really long one (like 6mo), but after that period is over it's basically impossible to fire people.
3mo is the standard notice period for you to give your employer when leaving, if you are made redundant then severance depends on tenure but it begins at 3 months and goes up to 1yr of salary (that I've seen.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes you’ll know during interviews. A long time ago, I interviewed someone who claimed something like 5+ years of Java development, and literally couldn’t write: class Foo { } On the whiteboard. In any context. That one saved us a lot of time. It wasn’t some weird out of context thing either, he just literally didn’t know how to write Java at all. Even approximately.
Yes, but you knew that within 1 hour. It (hopefully) didn't take you 6 hours to realize this person was a dud.
I also got lectured by senior management for exposing them to liability since I didn’t ’go through the whole process’.
And this was a middle aged white dude candidate, a small company, and about 20 years ago.
The risk tolerance has only decreased since then.
> I was asked what timeout I would set on a database connection. I was more thinking about how long an individual user could be prepared to wait for a page to render, so blurted out too high of a number. Interesting, I would have put those in the same ballpark. Anyone who can shed light on this?
Not to mention, you really should be connecting to a DB Pooler anyway, which handles your DB connections, rather than designing the individual implementation within the application or micro-service and try to keep all your services aligned.
I don't question that is takes hard work, even for more senior devs like the author, but 30 apps leading to 3 offers is a dream. Most early-career people are probably at >100 app with maybe a few interviews and hopefully one offer.
I guess I got really lucky - I just talked to friends and found three different jobs through their recommendations. Never had a proper job application or interview in my life - I reckon this will bite me in the ass sometime
Good to have a perspective that yeah, this is definitely very far on one end of the “fortunate/lucky” spectrum.
>For a typical job there were four or five interviews: an initial interview with a recruiter, an interview with a hiring manager, one or two technical interviews (either live coding, or going through a take-home assignment). There could also be an interview with a product manager, and/or one with a CTO or founder. All in all, quite a time commitment. This is not news at this point, but it is pretty crazy.
We have lost candidates at my company which we had pretty much already decided were a fit after 1-2 interviews but we're still forced to go through the rigmarole of these extra interviews over several weeks. It's not just crazy it's also a waste of time and resources.
I ended up getting an email from the team within minutes asking for a zoom where they literally begged me to keep going because they liked me the best of all the other candidates but are forced to have me go through the other interviews. They tried to get an exception for not doing the other interviews. They ended up being allowed to have only one more interview and they said that they could have an offer letter together within 24 hours of that interview. So I knew they were serious, but I was too tired and didnt love the bureaucracy of that place, so I just moved on.