Employers should be required, by law, to compensate interviewees for their time at a rate equivalent to the job for which they are interviewing.
(Macdonald’s, Goldman Sachs, line cook, VP legal, same law, everyone, everywhere)
Why the Job Search Sucks
21–30 of 128 posts
Re: Why the Job Search Sucks
#22> Writing CSS in JS? GROSS. Similarly jsx is writing HTML in JS. The whole evolution of web was to separate, modularize, componentize the concepts (DOMs, CSS, JS, HTML5 APIs, templates etc.), what on fucking earth happened?
The goalposts moved. We went from building websites to building SPAs, and the biggest problem there was reusing/abstracting/modularizing logic.
Re: Why the Job Search Sucks
#23The reference point for gaining employment is that dude who wrote Homebrew and got rejected by Google for being unable to "invert a binary tree on a whiteboard" [1] Unfortunately with this and many other articles I've read on HN over the years, the common theme is that decent/good programmers are not making it past HR. Everyone that wants to work in tech should instead navigate through the meetup/social space and bui…
Maybe I've been just unlucky with how many times I've had to google for weird "brew doctor" type incantations to make it happy, or with how (un)smoothly I've found it + a Mac compared to using real actual Linux, but is it outside the realm of possibility that you can make something a lot of people find useful for some situations and still not necessarily be qualified for or entitled to every job out there?
If it's truly because there was an algorithm question with no correlation to what the team worked on, that sucks. But I've seen the other side of enough of these rants to take any single anecdote with a giant grain of salt.
There's a few potential audiences for rants like this, but most of them are unproductive. Other frustrated people don't have influence to change things, and hiring managers not experiencing hiring issues don't have incentive to listen to you. The group you need to find, if this is how you're feeling, is the hiring managers who aren't having luck right now. Maybe because their company doesn't have as much name recognition, or as much money to offer, or a sexy office location in the Bay Area, whatever. They're gonna need to expand their pool to compete, and that's where potential matches are. It takes a lot more leg work and sales work of the "here's why I don't fit exactly what you're looking for but why you should be confident in my ability to get there fast" variety, but it can be accomplished - I did it about 7 years ago, myself, to get from the land of "boring jobs" to the land of "interesting jobs building 'interesting' experience," and have seen other people pull off the same path since then. You also generally will do better starting in a smaller environment like that with more face time with the key players in the company, than as another line-level cog at BigCompany.
Re: Why the Job Search Sucks
#24One thing about feedback: Too much feedback helps candidates game the system. This ultimately leads to bad hires, who end up getting fired. It hurts the process overall. When interviewing with a good interviewer, he (or she) knows that whiteboard sessions / tests / projects are just hypothetical situations. If I throw an unfamiliar API in front of you, and you ask certain wrong questions, I know you're not going to w…
These all seem like highly subjective criteria, which is the whole problem with the way hiring works in first place.
Re: Why the Job Search Sucks
#25Isn't this one of those asymmetry things where the hiring company has no incentive to make the process pleasant? They hold all the power/keys etc. Before people jump in with "what about negative Glassdoor reviews" or "negative reputation", I'm saying that all things taken into account, the equation is still in favor of the company. I don't know.
I think, collecting anegdotal examples, that we might have a particular crisis right now which reached the widely understood IT as well. Companies simply don’t want to hire, if they do they want compliance and dirt cheap. Many recruiting people I had little pleasant dealing with treat recruitment like buying an item - demand experience with exact technology match and an obedient person as well (“1-2 hours” code assignment). The situation is in a deadlock.
Re: Why the Job Search Sucks
#26But, why does job search sucks?
I feel like I need to hear the other side of the story to get the full picture.
Re: Why the Job Search Sucks
#27I think the answer to age bias (that author referred to) is remote work. No one gives a shit how old you are if all you need is code, slack, email, and zoom/webex. Or so is my experience.
Hmm! I never thought about suggesting that. I'll do so if/when I attend a similar seminar.
Re: Why the Job Search Sucks
#28Hey, just wanna stop by to say hi! I was in the same situation, the company I working for ran out of cash for no reason and I got no paycheck since November too :(
Damn, that sucks. I hope we both find an awesome place to work soon!
Re: Why the Job Search Sucks
#29It was nice to randomly find your name here (: Good luck with the interviews, I totally agree with your points. Your blog improved a lot since I last checked it! (The NX framework guy)
Haha, hey man! Yeah, I've been improving it bit by bit.
Re: Why the Job Search Sucks
#30One thing about feedback: Too much feedback helps candidates game the system. This ultimately leads to bad hires, who end up getting fired. It hurts the process overall. When interviewing with a good interviewer, he (or she) knows that whiteboard sessions / tests / projects are just hypothetical situations. If I throw an unfamiliar API in front of you, and you ask certain wrong questions, I know you're not going to w…
> Regarding whiteboarding, if the candidate argues with me about why we're using a particular API, I pretty much reject the candidate. (No, we can't use the new threading API, I want to see how you can learn this API. No, we can't use an ORM, I want to make sure that you understand how to use a database.)
YUCK. One of the first things I will do when presented with a technical scenario is start questioning the problem's parameters, including API choice.
Interviewer: "Show me how you'd store a list of items in C++." Me: "Well, depending on the expected usage pattern I'd reach for one of the standard library's containers like std::list since it is time tested, robust, and comes with the compiler." Interviewer: "No, er, I mean if you don't have std::list... I want to know you can implement something from scratch." Me: "Am I really going to be working on a project without the language's library?? You generally don't want someone's hand-rolled linked list in production code."
I guess not wanting to waste the company's time re-implementing a wheel makes me a bad candidate.