Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 1001 posts

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#101

Post by dixie_land »

caesil wrote: post #53

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept…

From personal experience the coding round gets easier for senior/staff roles, even for the exact same question, because of the experience the interviewers have and the signal they are looking for (eg problem solving, communication, testing, etc.)

At junior and "SDE II" level coding rounds are just toxic newly minted SDEs trying to make it a competition between the candidate and themselves ( I've got interviewers offended when I came up with a simpler solution than the one he had in mind)

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#102

Post by swiftcoder »

> everybody agrees on three things: > - the tech job requirements are completely broken > - the tech job interview process is completely broken > - yet, every company follows the same hiring process and posts the same job requirements

The pain. The pain I feel.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#103

Post by ndriscoll »

caesil wrote: post #53

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept…

The last time I interviewed and did a few LC problems, it was my experience that most of them were trivially solvable by some combination of implementing an iterator, doing a fold, and maybe adding memoization. Not every problem obviously, but those 3 steps seem to pretty generically cover most easy/mediums that will come up in a coding skills interview. When I got my first job, I didn't know what any of those things were, so I've also found coding interview problems to have become easier for me over time.

I've never used much Python in my day job, but the `yield` keyword is basically overpowered for LC problems.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#104

Post by twolf910616 »

How do you know you're not the midwit? To me it seems quite reasonable that author is the one over complicating everything, and in reality coding interviews are just not that bad.

[edit: they're not that bad in the sense that hiring is a inherently lossy process of projecting something incredibly complicated, like skills, personality, motivation, and situation into a 45 minute interview where only 1 or 2 dimension can be measured. If you increase the time/cost and do hire fast fire fast, then fine, you can get a better interview process, but it's not free. Other industries use stamps and certs to do that sorting, also not cost free. Coding interviews, yes we all hate it, but it's all a tradeoff.]

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#105

Post by Apocryphon »

eloisant wrote: post #90
chomp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m an old, but this thing called a “blog” was very popular a long time ago, where people would have their own slice of internet to write whatever they wanted.

Yeah, apparently it no longer works that way. You can ramble on social media, but if you publish it on your own site it needs to be worth publishing in a national newspaper or a peer-reviewed journal.

Guess that's why so many people just post and share essay-length tweetstorms.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#106

Post by morgante »

lovich wrote: post #25

I generally like the article but the author seems to have a really inflated view of what jobs are paying. At one point he’s claiming that a stable non tech company like a tractor manufacturer is paying 5k-10k. Even assuming that’s including taxes so divide by two, and constraining to just software employees for that claim. There is no way the average pay is nearly a million a year. The average software engineer in th…

It's absurd. He has no concept of market rates (and frankly I'm unsurprised that he's not getting hired if his expectations are this out of whack).

His resume even confirms this[0], because he seemingly thinks the appropriate level at FAANG would be L10 which is extremely rare. There is a 0% chance that his experience would level him that high.

The entire article can be chocked up to a massively inflated sense of entitlement.

[0] https://matt.sh/files/a-resume/resume.html

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#107

Post by heymijo »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #15

Wild that explanations of the tech job market like this are still being written without referencing the tax consequences of Section 174 changes.

TL;DR on Section 174, Research & Experimentation costs went from being fully deductible in the year incurred to being deductible over a 5 year period.

Larger tax bills and a tightening on what roles/activities are deductible as R&E are likely what OP is pointing at with his comment.

To the best of my non-inside baseball research, Section 174 changes were simply one part of a package of revenue generating measures to offset the large tax cuts from the broader tax act they were a part of.

The changes came from The Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017 that was introduced to the House of Representatives by Congressman Kevin Brady (R) Texas. The bill passed both houses of Congress along party lines. Then President Trump signed the bill into law. Section 174 changes did not take effect until 2021.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#108

Post by idiotlogical »

bumby wrote: post #18
Finnucane wrote: post #6

"we see correlation is causation and you can’t argue otherwise:" Right. Because none of us remember what was going on in the world at the time.

Can you explain further? I assumed you were talking about COVID, but the decline in jobs lags a few years behind so I'm not sure I'm tracking your point.

The inflation from the covid money-fountain came back to bite well after the pandemic. Central Bank sets the rates higher to purposefully chill the economy by triggering a recession, or ideally recession-lite. Making people unemployed is a key goal

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#109

Post by angry_moose »

lovich wrote: post #25

I generally like the article but the author seems to have a really inflated view of what jobs are paying. At one point he’s claiming that a stable non tech company like a tractor manufacturer is paying 5k-10k. Even assuming that’s including taxes so divide by two, and constraining to just software employees for that claim. There is no way the average pay is nearly a million a year. The average software engineer in th…

I think they're using some kind of "daily equivalent average pay, factoring in exponential growth of the stock divided by actual days worked over a career" -

> Under the modern tech landscape, stable “hyperscale ultra-growth” companies are paying experienced employees the equivalent of $10,000 to $50,000 per day if we include the value of their exponentially growing yearly stock grants.

Assuming a $250k salary, that's only about $1000/day. But if you're able to bank $50,000,000 in stock grants over a 40 years career (invest early and often in a high-growth company), that averages out to $5,000 per day.

Kinda dodgy math, should been better clarified, and that's still somewhat ambitious; but I think that's the idea behind it based on a couple allusions throughout the article.

Post reply on HN