Panic at the Job Market • Hacker News Board

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#211

Post by vunderba » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

not_wyoming wrote: post #171

mavamaarten wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

You said it yourself - it's a question of engineering versus business roles.

Software engineering doesn't necessarily have a higher bar than other comparable STEM.

And lest we forget many other roles have to pay their dues upfront at a much earlier stage: doctors have the MCAT, lawyers have to pass the bar, many accountants become CPAs, etc.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#212

Post by titanomachy » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

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 was thrown by this too, but I think the author is in his 40s and making comparisons to the VP-level comp that some of his peers are making after spending 20 years climbing the ranks at a single company.

He talks about making millions per year, so it’s not a typo.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#213

Post by e28eta » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

cellis wrote: post #132

LordDragonfang wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At one point he’s claiming that a stable non tech company like a tractor manufacturer is paying 5k-10k For anyone that came to the comments before the article, it claims that number is per day

He claims further down that some make 50k per day. I've met a lot of cashed out founders. I've even met someone who could be called a billionaire. None of them were pure software engineers that made "50k per day" at any point in their career. If you amortize what becomes a 50m grant over 4 years it's about 35k per day, but how many software engineers have done that?

Since a year is ~260 working days, your 50m grant is actually pretty close to $50k / day, not $35k

I do think your overall point stands

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#214

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

not_wyoming wrote: post #171

mavamaarten wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

I don't know that it's higher, per se but it's more that being able to discuss concepts isn't enough. A programmer needs to be able to translate those concepts into actual algorithms and working code. I've interviewed people who were able to look at the coding problem we gave them and discuss it intelligently, but when it came to actually writing even pseudocode to solve it, failed miserably.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#215

Post by mananaysiempre » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:37 PM UTC

jpcfl wrote: post #52

JohnFen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a personal blog. There's nothing wrong with being as casual as you like on your personal blog.

There is if your goal is to attract a wider audience. Call me old fashioned, but if you can't even be bothered to capitalize the first letter of each sentence in your publication, I'm probably not going to read it.

> if you can't even be bothered to capitalize the first letter of each sentence in your publication

I suspect this is actually more interesting than base sloppiness.

My first experience with instant messaging was on ICQ (and IRC a year or two later once my Internet usage wasn’t being billed by the minute), and to this day I don’t capitalize or end single-sentence replies with a period in IM situations. The no-period thing is mostly universal—I believe I’ve seen an article in a linguistics journal about how a final period “feels aggressive”—, but I’ve noticed people who learned on smartphones using keyboards with automatic capitalization do, which just looks unnatural to me.

So if someone writes a blog post not as an article, but as a monologue in this kind of conversational style, I can see how they could come to not capitalize and use newlines as sentence breaks. I believe that style is (was?) somewhat popular on Tumblr? I’m honestly a bit surprised it wasn’t more popular on Twitter before the 140-character was lifted.

I’ve heard that communication over IM is actually linguistically interesting (the whole thing, of course, not the punctuation)—in most ways it works like a spoken (or signed) conversation, except it’s expressed in writing. So it’s not entirely unexpected that it can develop conventions that are unlike that of the normal written word. And despite the thousands of years people have been using writing, there isn’t really precedent for this kind of thing before computers.

(I’m also not convinced anything good comes out of trying to attract a generically wider audience.)

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#216

Post by jaxr » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:39 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…

What type of coding interview do you find more valuable for the interviewer? Algo code interview always looked like the interviewer trying to show off to me. Guess it depends on the requirements of the job, though...

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#217

Post by skrebbel » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

Yeah ok if you expect to be paid $10k per day working at a tractor company, job hunting is going to be hard.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#218

Post by titanomachy » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:42 PM UTC

ivanech wrote: post #57

I found all the napkin math in this befuddling. I’m not sure where these “per day” benchmarks are coming from -— is this supposed to be executive pay or mid-level/senior engineer pay? Because $5k - $10k / day works out to $1m - $3m / yr (depending on if you use 200 working days / yr or just 365). Which, yes, happens (esp with good year of stock appreciation) but is not as common as the prose makes it seem. Also these…

He mentioned he has 20+ years of experience, so I think he is in fact comparing to VP-level roles. Most people I’ve met at faang who are over 40 are in fact seniorstaff+ or director+, so it’s not as insane as it seems on first blush, although I think to reach his numbers you’d have to factor in stock appreciation as well.

I also think far more people leave faang altogether than reach VP level.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#219

Post by jf22 » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:42 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…

What? There are still millions of people with great high paying tech jobs.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#220

Post by euphetar » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

evrimoztamur wrote: post #23

I will add my two cents for people who believe that this might be related only to the SWE and tangent industries: It's really not. I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from finance to fashion, or just trying to get promoted vertically (or horizontally), failing rather miserably. Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideratio…

the tidbit didn't work though, I just tried with GPT-4o