231–240 of 720 posts
Funny how the dip started years before we had meaningful AI codegen. Could speculate this is likely to be a shift in what gets funded and invested in.
Are there real positions these days? I get rejection for every single position that I apply to. Often I read literally a description of myself in job posting, and it's still "we decided to no move forward". At the same time, I hire people and see that 8/10 candidates are just trash. Not in the sense they "are not aligned", or "emit wrong vibes", or other bs. They literally can't write a single line of code, on their…
One low point was an interview with a guy who connected with his current work laptop and couldn’t find the $ key on it for a basic scripting question.
I can’t make it make sense either.
In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI a…
I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hand…
Did you get any offers yet? It seems the issue is not lack of interviews but lack of offers. Many companies are looking for a goldilocks candidate and are happy to pass on anything that doesn't match their ideal candidate
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In tech 'culture fit' is generally a dog whistle for ageism in my experience.
I also think its being used to filter out people that aren't basically a mirror for the interviewers in many instances. I've noticed a huge tightening of the rope around that sort of thing. I can't tell you how many times I've passed all the tests, all the interview things, get to the final round with the team and the rejection email comes in despite having good conversations. By all accounts, I believe any person wo…
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I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hand…
> I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems. Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why I’ve grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. As experience shows that projects won’t stay in the nice greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory…
It's kind of like when the FAA does crash investigation -- a stunning amount of engineering and process insights have been generated by such work to the benefit of all of us.
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Exactly. Hire someone 80-90% there and invest in their training FFS.
Answered elsewhere: If we're investing in someone's training we'll promote someone from within who is already familiar with the product and then backfill their simpler work.
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Simple: don’t do that. It’s been well over a decade that I’ve had to do the coding interview monkey dance and I actually turned down an offer where I did pass a coding interview because I found it insulting and took a job for slightly less money where the new to the company director was interested in a more strategic hire (2016). That was the same thing that happened before in 2014 and after in 2018 - a new manager/d…
> ability to reverse a b tree on the whiteboard I can never get over how this became a thing. Was listening to a Brian Cox video on YouTube the other night (something about his voice helps me sleep). He said "I don't memorize formulas, it's easy to look them up." If you ever need to reverse a b tree (in 30+ years of writing code, I never have) it's easy to look that up. It tells me nothing about your ability as a dev…
For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited having 14 years of experience and being up to date with development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc. I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis
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Simple: don’t do that. It’s been well over a decade that I’ve had to do the coding interview monkey dance and I actually turned down an offer where I did pass a coding interview because I found it insulting and took a job for slightly less money where the new to the company director was interested in a more strategic hire (2016). That was the same thing that happened before in 2014 and after in 2018 - a new manager/d…
> ability to reverse a b tree on the whiteboard I can never get over how this became a thing. Was listening to a Brian Cox video on YouTube the other night (something about his voice helps me sleep). He said "I don't memorize formulas, it's easy to look them up." If you ever need to reverse a b tree (in 30+ years of writing code, I never have) it's easy to look that up. It tells me nothing about your ability as a dev…
It's a contrived scenario, but the whole point is that it measures min(a,b) where `a` is your ability to think, and `b` is your ability to prepare (and memorize answers ahead of time). (I'd personally try to find ways to measure `a` instead of `b`, maybe by asking questions people wouldn't have heard before.)
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Two reasons. One, they have already filled it internally but legally have to post the job. Two, they are gathering data on market trends and what salaries people will take, which is useful if they are considering firing people and rehiring with lower salaries. I've applied for many jobs where I was perfectly qualified and got rejection notices immediately. I applied on a Sunday and got rejected on Sunday an hour late…
> and if that's the case, what other explanation is there than "ghost jobs." You didn't pass some arbitrary ruleset given to an AI or machine learning algorithm. Companies can be very selective now, and usually implement this selectivity fairly stupidly. There also is the problem of being genuinely swamped with bullshit applicants for positions, so the false positive rate is likely quite high at the moment. I've foun…