101–110 of 126 posts
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Isn't it obvious? Using a debugger implies that you expect the code you write to have bugs. Not a mindset I'd like my coworkers to have.
Yep, this is the kind of senior tech lead advice I'm willing to shell out 475k total comp for.
Have I been incredibly lucky my entire career? I don't think I've applied for more than 10 jobs at once. I have heard stories like this before - maybe the market has shifted drastically, or maybe spamming 2500 applications means each one is ... less good than one might think? Tailoring your application to each job has worked well for me at least. 46 Interviews is also a huge amount. I've done less than that my entire…
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Isn't it obvious? Using a debugger implies that you expect the code you write to have bugs. Not a mindset I'd like my coworkers to have.
Is this sarcasm or epic hubris? No-one writes bug-free code, and thinking otherwise sounds like an enormous red flag.
If I get around to it I'll eventually write a book about this technique.
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2500 apps is with his wife and brother helping. 46 phone screens out of that, a 1.8% conversion rate, is totally realistic. My rate was 6% but I was very targeted. I had 32 phone screens. These usually only take 30 minutes and don't require much prep. > maybe the market has shifted drastically You're catching on. This is the worst job market in 20 years, far worse than the 2009 recession. In 2009, tons of college kid…
Is it really? Because unemployment numbers don't line up with it being the worst market in 20 years.
I haven't applied to as many places but its defiantly demoralizing. Looking at pay cuts feels so bad too. Its not like life stops being expensive. Rent keeps going up, prices for homes out of reach, food keeps getting more expensive, especially eating healthy, gas, electricity bill. it never ends. then you need to listen to some soulless hr robot tell you 180k is to much...
By most objective measures, $180k is very much on the high end for that role in the US. Markets vary of course, but the lifestyle you've setup for yourself doesn't determine what your skills are worth.
I'm a 30+ year experience SWE. I had my own successful startup exit and after that I skipped FAANG to join the founding teams at other startups founded by Ex-FAANG big names. Unfortunately none of them panned out. I recently went through a series of interviews with a company that were dragged out over two months. Each went very well. My last interview was with a "Senior Engineer" who graduated in 2020 and had a littl…
Out of (morbid) curiosity - what was his objection to using a debugger?
It’s not that much of a stretch to say that a debugger is a level of “help” that they want to see you do without during an interview. Using a debugger is a sign that you’re not sure what your code is doing and so you need “help”… maybe the interviewer was looking to see that they could fit the exercise in their head well enough to solve the problem without a debugger.
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Just that I used it at all. There's a contingent of engineers who feel using a debugger is a waste of time and or a sign of weakness. They're the ones who like to stare at code and "run it in their heads" and dump crazy amounts of "got here" into the logs. Evidently this guy is one of them.
There's two reasons I think. (I have ~25 years experience) 1. In your code should know what the edge cases, loop condition issues, etc. I think this is fair. If you don't know the edge case failures when you write your code, you could end up with something like the Microsoft Xune that shutdown for an entire day over a leap year failure. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/original-mic... Keep in mind that…
Perhaps, but:
> It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/
Sometimes you want to go to 'first principles' and reassess your assumptions. As a sysadmin I sometimes I resort to making sure the thing is actually physically plugged in (OSI Layer 1), the move up the stack with regards to how the bits flow.
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Out of (morbid) curiosity - what was his objection to using a debugger?
Just to chime in with a different take from the rest of the comments: there’s lots of tools that aren’t really appropriate to use during an interview. If you’re being asked to do (say) tree traversal, then in real life it’s totally fine to Google it and copy/paste a code snippet. But during an interview, presumably they want to know how much you can do on your own without “help”. It’s not that much of a stretch to sa…
A debugger is as much "help" to an engineer as a hammer is to a carpenter. In my experience, engineers who don't use one are a detriment to the entire engineering organization wasting time and money.
Anyway, yeah I dodged a bullet on that but it's such a pain in the ass that I went though a two month interview process only to be vetoed at the end like that. During that time I spent about two weeks to learn an esoteric API that I'll never use again. Oh and it would have been highly unlikely that I would have even used that API in the job. It was just a requirement that I learned it for this particular interview. ...and no I'm not going to commit it to memory just so I can pass a coding interview and if that was the expectation then this whole situation is even more ridiculous.
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$200k+ total comp for a product manager is pretty good. I wonder if previous experience at FAANG is becoming a negative factor in the hiring process. Run-of-the-mill Fortune 500s aren't going to pay Meta money ($475k+) for a product manager. More like $120-150k. And maybe they're looking to avoid the expectations (read: entitlement) from those who are used to those kinds of outsized salaries.
They also don't need FAANG-level competence. F500 companies would rather pay consultants and contractors truckloads of money than hire a few FTEs at FAANG rates. Ostensibly the reasoning is that it's easy to cut back spending on vendors than to lay people off, but I think a stronger reason is that tech salaries are so high that you'd have software engineers being paid more than some executives at these companies.
Or maybe it has more to do with accounting practices or with liability. We're talking F500 HR logic here.