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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#171

Post by not_wyoming »

mavamaarten wrote: post #126
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…

I've never understood why people hate them so much. From the employer side of things it only makes sense to get a feeling for someone's abilities other than an impression based on words alone. You can't believe the amount of shit solutions we've gotten from candidates. We just let you make a very simple kata. A tiny program that generates some console output, you have to refactor it to make it prettier and you need t…

> From the employer side of things it only makes sense to get a feeling for someone's abilities other than an impression based on words alone.

I'd like to believe this is true, but it fails to explain why candidates for other business functions don't receive the same scrutiny.

I'm not aware of analogous evaluations to get hired to other business roles (e.g. marketer candidates aren't asked to demonstrate a working knowledge of the Google ads dashboard, accountants aren't expected to clean up a fake P&L on their own time for review by hiring managers, etc).

I could be wrong and always welcome correction, but from anecdotal experience talking to friends and work colleagues, the bar for SWE hiring is much, much higher, even controlling for compensation.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#172

Post by not_wyoming »

makestuff wrote: post #141
ndriscoll wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I realized you are at a significant disadvantage by not interviewing in python especially when you get some problem that requires parsing some input. IMO it is worth it to spend a couple of weeks practicing python before doing any technical interview.

Yes and no! I was just rejected from a job because I used Python's heap functions and the interviewer didn't know what those were or how they worked.

It's not the first time either, once got rejected for using namedtuples!

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#173

Post by FrustratedMonky »

radiator wrote: post #166
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of his analysis about financial markets, can apply to all jobs, all hiring. Don't think he explicitly states that, but all hiring is down. Or at least all entry positions it seems like. From a SWE perspective. Doesn't it seem like systems are falling apart? You can only cut back programmer/tech jobs for so long, someone has to know how it all works. This is what I don't get, all around me, people don't know how t…

I read an assumption there, that if a company hires more tech people, the situation of its systems will improve. This contradicts the tao of programming, from which I quote: The manager asked the Master: "How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?" "It will take one year," said the Master promptly. "But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I ass…

Yes.

That does go along with article I just saw on Valve that they operate their systems with 350 admins, versus EA with 10,000 people.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#174

Post by analogwzrd »

My pessimistic take on the world at the moment is that at least 50% of jobs in the US fall into Graeber's BS jobs category. I saw a map a few years ago that labelled the largest employer in each state. In every state except Arkansas (Walmart), the largest employer was a university or a healthcare company. Education and healthcare policies are controversial because everyone wants those things to be as good as possible, but also because a huge majority of Americans are employed in those industries and our governments pump massive amounts of funding into these bureaucratic structures.

We already have UBI, it's just the overblown bureaucracies housed by American corporate structures.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#175

Post by RyanAdamas »

Kinda hard to have a SWE sector worth protecting when its all H1B Visa applicants. You guys realize these companies have to be unable to find suitable candidates in order to import workers who will undermine labor, right? In addition, the mass influx of illegal migrant workers are reducing the otherwise buoyant wage effect of menial labor.

The idea that a mass influx of Indian workers taking top-tier STEM jobs is good for the USA is absolute self-accepted denigration of our society. But, Hacker News doesn't care, YCombinator has led the way in undermining high-end domestic labor for over a decade. Drink the Kool-Aid to get the funding, ammiright?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#176

Post by radiator »

creer wrote: post #147
dixie_land wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 offe…

It's true that the interview result can only be as good as the interviewer's skill and awareness of what to look for. Which will often be terrible. BUT that does point out a mis-perception of the interview process. You will do better by getting along, "figuring out", going along with the interviewers' plan - rather than trying to demonstrate your own cleverness. Not saying this is what @dixie_land personally went for…

Why work to make the interviewer happy again? If your solution is better than the interviewer's you should expect the interviewer to acknowledge that fact, like an adult and like a team player. He is not supposed to be offended or unhappy.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#177

Post by marcosdumay »

cogman10 wrote: post #28
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.

Well, the old tax code was a little bonkers. My entire department was labeled R&D pre 2022 even though there was very little research going on.

Software development is almost always development.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#178

Post by geraldwhen »

scottLobster wrote: post #127
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…

There's coding interviews and coding interviews. Asking basic questions that will be directly applicable to the job? Sure Filtering for basic knowledge to make sure the candidate isn't lying about their experience? Sure. Examining my thought process and producing working code is a nice-to-have? Sure. Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come u…

I run coding interviews. I would never give an esoteric algorithms question, or even really an algorithms question.

I have prompts that test very basic concepts and nearly everyone fails. Resume fraud is rampant.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#179

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #92

>The “most advanced” people often use simple solutions indistinguishable from people who don’t know what they are doing. Average people are often in the “knows enough to be dangerous” category by over-thinking and over-working and over-processing everything out of lack of more complete experience to discover simpler and cleaner solutions. The article was worth reading just for the above gem.

I once had to design an error-message display for an office machine with an 8-line, 40-character wide LCD. Errors could only be shown on the bottom line and if they were more than 40 characters long (I'm looking at you, German language!), they had to scroll.

I spent hours trying to figure out some mathematical calculation that took the screen width and the total length of the error message and how much was off screen, etc., to come up with a good algorithm that worked for all combinations of message lengths. By lunchtime I had something workable, but it was the ugliest code imaginable.

We went to lunch and when I came back, I looked at the machine and the obvious solution came to me: the screen was just a 40-character wide window into the text and all I had to do was pan it over the length of the message. Like barely 3 lines of code to implement.

I try to remember that lesson whenever I find myself spending way too much time on something that sounds like it should be simple!

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#180

Post by jldugger »

Peroni wrote: post #158
bedobi wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those people pass both tests -- referral and standard hiring. To me the question hinges on whether people refer people who might fail standard screening, or if they're just cherry picking in ways your analysis "discovers."

The difference to employers might be moot I suppose, but if you want to substitute referral for standard hiring screens you kinda need to get at something like this to know if referrals are contributing any new information or just boosting hit ratios on existing tests.

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