101–110 of 496 posts
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Colleges aren't all equal. Professional certifications are different
Professional certifications have a terrible reputation for good reason. You are perhaps too young to know why this is a silly idea. But its been tried and it failed spectacularly.
Not only do they have the resume and a cover letter that took time, but they also wasted your time on a fake interview with a bot. All without disclosing anything.
Perfectly encapsulates the state of the job market. Interviewing is genuinely a hellscape at this point and I've experienced many interviews where there was a complete breakdown of etiquette/guidelines and good faith. One was so bad I had to write about it: https://ossama.is/writing/betrayed
You wrote something that I think is untrue of most tech companies, so I'd like to discuss it:
> [As I and a friend spoke], I realised something: Three technical interviews went well, I was feeling confident going into the behavioural interview... This means that I'm heading into behavioural and HR contract stages with confidence in my performance thus far and my ability to excel at the role. And it means that I have the upper hand in salary and benefit negotiation. This is horrible for them. THEY NEED to shut me down and bring me down a few rungs before this step. And to edge me for 2 weeks (and counting...) after the supposed final round before I hear anything back.
I suspect that approximately 0% of top tech firms are trying to tank your interview as a comp-negotiating tactic. For most of these firms, the biggest problem is finding people they want to hire. To find qualified people, they need to measure what applicants, like you, can actually do. And they can't get a good measurement when they sabotage your performance. Further, if they decide to hire you, they need you to feel good about the company, not hate it because of how you were maltreated. They want you to say yes to their offer, not rage quit the hiring pipeline.
I'm not saying that there aren't bad companies or bad interviewers out there. Nor am I saying that you can't get into an interview where the other person is actually out to get you. It happens. Maybe it happened to you.
What I'm trying to say is that if your mental model of the hiring process is that the company is probably going to sabatage your end-game interviews, you're probably going to be wrong most of the time and make some bad decisions.
> What do you think? Was that a normal interview that I should have expected? I am in the wrong by posting this? Should I nuke my blog?
Here's what I think. If you have a public blog, it's fair game at an interview. If you write mostly about data science stuff but you apply for a software engineering job, you ought to be prepared to explain the contrast. Understand that, for most top firms, hiring good people and getting them to stick is hard. Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for. If you send signals that you might want some other position, be prepared to get asked about those signals.
And you got asked about those signals:
> "How do we know we won't hire you and you'll try to transition to a data scientist?"
You ought to be prepared for questions like these. For example, most interviewers would probably be satisfied with an answer like these:
That's a great question. Data science is something I do for fun in my spare time. I don't want it to become my day job. I love software engineering and that's what I want to focus my career on.
Or:
That's an important question. Thanks for asking about it. I try to stay abreast of important trends in industry, and when AI and data became important in some of my past work, I put in some personal time to learn more about them. When I learn things, I often write about them on my blog to help me remember. My blog's just a learning tool, a memory aid, right? It's not a barometer of my career interests. If you want to know what my career interests are, let me be clear: I want to write software. Five years from now, I still want to be a software engineer.
> Should I nuke my blog?
I'd say no. But you should read your blog from the perspective of a firm that's considering you for a job and be prepared to explain away anything they might have concerns about.
That's just my two cents. If you find anything in my comment helpful, great. If not, feel free to dismiss everything I've written.
Best wishes on your job hunt.
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Arbitrary filtering of candidates is always an option, but then you may as well do it as cheaply as possible. Throw out half the resumes.
Arbitrary filtering of candidates doesn't reduce the effort that it takes. Let's say 1 out of 1000 of the candidates you see is what you need. The total amount of effort to find the right candidate is still the same. But throwing out half the resumes just doubles the amount of time until you find the candidate you need (you just spread lower effort over a longer time). On the other hand if you "raise your bar" (let's…
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Resource allocation is entirely a social construct. Not being afford something is a 'pretend' state that only exists because everyone agrees to go along with it. Even if a magical unicorn were to step in and start distributing resources perfectly, solving that particular problem, if humans can't even get something as simple as resource allocation right, why are you so sure they won't also screw up everything else to…
> Resource allocation is entirely a social construct. Not being afford something is a 'pretend' state that only exists because everyone agrees to go along with it. That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit. If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it. That is no social construct. There is a large social element involved, but that in itself is done in such a way as to tr…
Hence resource allocation. If there were no physical limit, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity.
> If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it.
Hence resource allocation. If there were an infinite number of apples, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity.
> There is a large social element involved
There is only the human social element involved. There isn't a magical deity in the sky waving a magic wand or a group of space aliens from Xylos IV deciding who gets what. Resources are allocated only by how people, and people alone, decide they want to allocate them.
You being unable to afford something isn't some fundamental property of the universe. It is simply something people made up at random and decided to run with it. People could, in theory, change their mind on a whim such that suddenly you could become able to afford something.
> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources
Now you're finally starting to get on-topic. So given that you see humans as being beyond terrible at allocating resources, why do you think, if they were relieved of having to handle resource allocation, that they would suddenly become not terrible at everything else in order to see all of those other problems magically disappear, per the contextual parent comment? Not going to happen. The harsh reality is that creating problems is human nature.
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I got dinged on my Netflix take home 10 years ago because I used the DOM to store state instead of implementing a shadow DOM. Sure, let me just whip that right up.
Outstanding. I've done quite a few interviews and as long as the interviewee maybe said something like "it would be better to use a shadow DOM" and could explain what a shadow DOM is, I would be pretty happy with that Expecting someone to build a full shadow DOM as part of their interview take home is excessive
The worst is when they basically ask how you'd build their product. Some people can't handle a different answer, even as they're busy hiring you to improve things.
I guess if your goal is just to hire desperate people who currently have no better choice (and who will leave as soon as they do), then you can flaunt how little you care about the candidates or the process. But if you're hoping for something better than that, I wouldn't run off as many candidates as possible.
I mean, this is probably a time-saving way to filter out a flood of poor candidates, but you're going to also be filtering out good candidates at a very high rate.