Panic at the Job Market • Hacker News Board

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#151

Post by bedobi » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:00 PM UTC

Peroni wrote: post #86

Hiring people (mostly engineers) has been my full-time job now for about 15 years and I found myself emphatically agreeing with a lot of Matt's criticisms of modern hiring. Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration. Matt's…

except that referral hiring isn't a thing almost anywhere

I know because I've referred people I KNOW are great SE's and I'm literally willing to vouch my own employment for, and they still get treated no different to any other candidate

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#152

Post by marssaxman » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:00 PM UTC

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…

My perspective aligns with your newer opinion. I have never studied for an interview, and cannot clearly imagine what such a process would involve; neither have I ever taken a CS course. A coding interview therefore feels like an opportunity to demonstrate my approach to problem-solving using the skills I have acquired over the years, which feels like a reasonable thing to ask of a potential future coworker.

My pet theory, after listening to people gripe about coding interviews for many years now, is that people who have gone into the workforce from a university CS program frequently mistake job interviews for classroom tests, imagining that the goal is to produce a correct answer, and that is why they believe they must study and memorize.

That is certainly not what I expect when I am interviewing someone! I want to see you work and I want to hear you communicate, so I can judge what it might be like to collaborate with you. If I can see that you are capable of breaking down a problem and digging in, asking sensible questions, and making progress toward a reasonable solution, I don't care that much whether you actually arrive there.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#153

Post by EFreethought » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:00 PM UTC

voiceblue wrote: post #79

thegrim33 wrote: post #22

[flagged]

It’s because they are writing for the masses. What happened to professional writing? This: “When The Wealth of Nations was first published in March 1776 David Hume wrote to his old friend in terms of the greatest praise, while qualifying his hopes by remarking that ‘the reading of it necessarily requires so much attention, and the public is disposed to give so little, that I shall still doubt for some time of its bei…

A lot of writing from that era strikes me as convoluted. I wonder what English teachers today think of it.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#154

Post by wnolens » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:00 PM UTC

masterj wrote: post #39

There might be some good points buried in this post, but all I get is bitterness without much self-reflection. They seem like they'd be difficult to work with and would blame you for it.

I stopped at (paraphrased): "I've never passed a coding interview. Coding interviews hire the wrong people!"

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#155

Post by dlisboa » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:01 PM UTC

ukoki wrote: post #88

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #67

What is hidden from all this is one of the greatest scams happening in the tech industry: recruiters. I think there is not enough light shone on these group of people but basically they have hijacked the whole process and are not technically skilled to understand good developers. UK tech companies for example have been decimated because of this.

How is it a scam? If it was that bad nearly all companies would just use in-house recruiters Someone has to do the work of pestering software developers on LinkedIn. If the external recruiters didn't do it, companies would just do it themselves.

One thing is that in many cases recruiters cast a very wide net and can't distinguish competent from incompetent developers. This low signal-to-noise ratio means companies create increasingly more difficult interview processes to basically see if the people can actually code, in extremely artificial environments (LeetCode problems, etc).

That means you lose out on people who are actually good if you just talked to them for 30 minutes, but got screened out because they didn't remember CS algorithms off the top of their mind after 15 years in the industry delivering actual products.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#156

Post by regularfry » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:02 PM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #103

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…

You would be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) at how many applicants get filtered by extremely basic elements of a tech test that's specific to the employer and therefore not something that can just be memorised or drilled. It's a low bar, but it can be a very worthwhile one.

There's a second factor, too, which is that sometimes you want an easy test so that you can judge coding style. You need to be careful not to ding people who don't already use whatever your house style is (which has bitten me in the past) but you generally do want to see something that you can have a style conversation about.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#157

Post by quacked » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:02 PM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #102

> 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.

The thing is, only the engineers think that tech job requirements are completely broken, because the money is still flowing through the industry. The only signal that leadership and HR would take that something might be wrong is if money stopped flowing through the industry.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#158

Post by Peroni » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:02 PM UTC

bedobi wrote: post #151

Peroni wrote: post #86

Hiring people (mostly engineers) has been my full-time job now for about 15 years and I found myself emphatically agreeing with a lot of Matt's criticisms of modern hiring. Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration. Matt's…

except that referral hiring isn't a thing almost anywhere I know because I've referred people I KNOW are great SE's and I'm literally willing to vouch my own employment for, and they still get treated no different to any other candidate

I'm not saying referral hiring is executed well. It's really poorly executed. When I look at the data of companies I've hired for and tracked the success rates of referral hires, they systematically perform better than average.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#159

Post by extr » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:02 PM UTC

I found myself nodding along to some parts of this (hiring practices, company types) but I found the endless complaining about bad engineering practices frustrating to read. Running a company requires making tradeoffs. Everyone always thinks their pet interest/area is not getting enough attention. Of course the cloud architecture guy is foaming at the mouth to tell you your cloud architecture is terrible and needs to be fixed. I bet the marketing guys are foaming at the mouth to tell you your ad spend is suboptimal and also needs to be fixed this instant. But if the shitty architecture ran for 7 years, was it really that shitty? Am I supposed to be totally dumbfounded at someone copy and pasting a repo 12 times for 12 customers, as if that's the most insane thing in the world. It sounds like it WORKED dude! Yeah it sucks to clean up the mess once it becomes unmanageable, but that's literally why you were hired!

The bottom line is if you are so damn smart and think everyone else is making bad tradeoffs, why don't you prove it and start your own company? Or consulting business? Or anything?

If you're not actively doing that, then I would say you are implicitly accepting your status as "a thing to be traded off against" and should just shut the fuck up. The value of a professional is being able to help with these tradeoffs, communicate clearly what .5X resources will get you versus X resources. You can't be upset that you're only getting .5X (or .1X) resources. You can only use your judgement to execute, and predict/communicate outcomes from that decision. If someone decides not to take your advice, that's their prerogative, they're in charge! If you don't like it, go be in charge somewhere else.

Alternatively, you can take the stance of total responsibility. If you give good advice, and your leadership didn't take it, who's fault is that? Really? Isn't it your job to make sure that people do the right things when it comes to your area of expertise? Did you sell your advice well enough?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#160

Post by FrustratedMonky » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:04 PM UTC

cjbgkagh wrote: post #89

This is what crushing of the middle class looks like, the Tech Market is no longer the safe harbor it used to be. This is also what demand destruction looks like. Mathematically we will end up with some sort of wealth tax but that just means it’s in the government’s interest to continue exasperating wealth inequality. A wealth tax won’t save the middle class, it’s more likely to be another nail in the coffin. At leas…

In the end, the wealthy allow government to introduce just enough socialism to keep the masses from revolting. NOT, to level the playing field, or to re-distribute wealth, but to keep the in-equality in place.