201–210 of 374 posts
Why is Anthropic hiring developers? Amodei said that AI will be generating all the code by the end of the year.
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This is such an insightful take. As someone who has interviewed many candidates, I wholeheartedly agree. While it's important to reflect on how you can improve, it's also critical to maintain morale and become comfortable with rejection during the job hunt. One of the biggest obstacles I've seen; whether with friends, family, or candidates; is the tendency to internalize rejection as a sense of being inherently 'bad.…
> Of course, once you internalize this belief, any motivation to study is gone This is definitely not a universal truth. I know that if I had done better in every interview then I would’ve moved ahead and gotten the job. I guess that’s a different way of saying I was “bad” (not good enough). And it doesn’t affect my motivation in a negative way. I find that it actually helps me want to improve more.
https://opentext.wsu.edu/theoreticalmodelsforteachingandrese...
Dear Author, the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated. You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or sever…
Dear Author, the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated. You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or sever…
I normally don't publish sappy essays like this, but I wanted to try sharing a common experience of rejection with a loud call for optimism and self-growth. I'm still learning how to be an authentic/vulnerable person, and I may have missed the mark
I like myself now. I really do. But sometimes that old self-doubt comes roaring back and I have to beat it down with a stick. You're totally right -- internet strangers cannot beat those feelings down for me.
By the time I published this, I was already back in a great headspace and moving on to the next thing :)
My hope is that somebody reads the essay and grows 1% more motivated to grab a stick and beat down their own self-doubts. I'll be sure to put that front-and-center in future essays
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> there is no information in a rejection. The most helpful job interview I had was when the interviewer broke script and just leveled with me about how I wasn't presenting myself well. There was a shared connection (our alma mater) that must have convinced him to be straight with me instead of hiding how poorly I was doing behind a mask. The HR handbooks say that you should never let a candidate know why they were no…
The HR handbooks say that for good reason. Telling a candidate why they were rejected means they'll argue with you, or worse, file a lawsuit.
I recently did a round of interviews at various AI companies, including model labs, coding assistants, and data vendors. My first takeaway is that, wow! the interviews are very hard, and the bar is high. Second, these companies are all selecting for the top 0.1% of some metric - but they use different metrics. For example, the coding assistant interview focused on writing (what I felt was) an insane volume of code in…
I had a bunch of these my last round of interviews, and am not convinced most companies even know what they want from these or how to assess. In the majority of cases it was clear to me the interviewers never even read the code I had submitted.
As an example, one company wanted a full AI Question/Answer system for large code projects using RAG to work on an arbitrarily large code base with an eval suite to go with it and also an API endpoint that could be called to automate asking of questions. You only had 24 hours to complete the assignment from receipt.
It was clear even before this that the company was likely not a good match, but I wanted to implement it for fun anyway. I'd already built all of this in production at a previous job (though it took weeks, which still felt pretty fast) so I knew how to approach it. Got it all done in time, met all acceptance criteria, had it so the entire thing could be run with one line of code (including building the RAG system, running evaluations, starting the webserver for the running API endpoint)... and rejected with no feedback a week later.
The trouble with asking people to write massive amounts of code in short periods of time is that you actually have to review it. I also have to say, despite the competitiveness, I was pretty unimpressed with the technical skills of the people on these teams (mostly smaller AI startups for me). It takes a pretty skilled engineer to assess the quality of a code base in such a short period of time and these teams did not seem like that had a lot of extra time on their hands.
One great piece of advice an informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection . That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in th…
I was old (55, at the time), and that seemed to actually upset the interviewers.
I had all the right buzzwords, but as soon as they saw my grey coiffure, the process started going sideways. Somehow, they seemed to think that a 30-year-old could have 30 years of experience.
I was treated pretty shabbily, a couple of times. It was clear that I was considered a waste of time.
I only made it to a test a few times. I failed the BTree part of one test (of course), and they didn't seem to like what I returned in a take-home, once. I also once failed a Swift test (I had just started programming in Swift), when I applied for an ObjC job. Otherwise, I did passably (but probably not outstanding) on the tests.
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> interviewers barely read resumes I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry. Do you, as an interviewer, not read resumes? I read loads of resumes and the truth is more like everyone are terrible communicators. Especially software engineers. Most resumes are badly formatted, badly typeset, full of errors and give me confusing/contradictory details about what your job responsibilities were rather…
> I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry. It's not. I've been in a number of interviews where the interviewer has told me straight up "I didn't read your resume. Mind giving me a second to give it a scan?" To be fair, as you mention, resumes are horrible tools. They should only be used as a place to start a conversation, so does it really matter if the interviewer reads it in depth before star…
Dear Author, the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated. You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or sever…
Thanks! I normally don't publish sappy essays like this, but I wanted to try sharing a common experience of rejection with a loud call for optimism and self-growth. I'm still learning how to be an authentic/vulnerable person, and I may have missed the mark I like myself now. I really do. But sometimes that old self-doubt comes roaring back and I have to beat it down with a stick. You're totally right -- internet stra…
At the end of the day the grandfather comment is more or less correct, the internet is a cold unfeeling whatever. But the act of writing from the heart is deeply, genuinely human and in this day and age I feel that the more human things I do, the better. And perhaps by being more obviously human will inspiring others to be more obviously human, and eventually making the internet (and perhaps the world) less of a cold and unfeeling whatever.
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This. I've hired in a number of roles, in several industries, and what they've all had in common is that rejection is never personal. My first career was in theatre, which a) is (or at least was, back in the day?) much more competitive than tech - par was one callback (ie, second screening) per 100 auditions, and one casting per 10 callbacks; and b) is genuinely, deeply vulnerable - you have to bring your whole self…
It's never personal You never screened candidates who couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag?