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They Rejected Us

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Re: They Rejected Us

#231
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have 2 choices. You can do it discretely; after work hours, no the may not contact my employer. Or, you can do it openly; multi-hour lunch breaks, lots of personal time off, and your LinkedIn profile is super active. The latter will either get you a salary increase or you'll be shown the door. Ask me how I know.

I haven't had an on-site yet that didn't require blocking off an entire day.

I have had half-days (my company does that too) which pretty much require a full day off.

Re: They Rejected Us

#232
At one time long ago I worked in IT before moving to another industry that was more who you know and personal rep (interviews were a formality). What sticks out to me here is the number of people who say they were 'escorted out' in the middle of an interview or otherwise had one abruptly terminated.

Beyond the rudeness, it smacks of arrogance. Even if you sense the the person will not be a good match, there are ways of wrapping up a little quicker without being a *bag. And we wonder at the coarseness of our society today.

Re: They Rejected Us

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typescript doesn’t do a lot of transpilation if your target is ES6.

True, but in TS I've found the code is structured differently, to the point where 'prototype' inheritance is effectively obfuscated. The other thing I find odd is why employers care that someone has deep and existential knowledge of JS? Who cares? I would probably object to any of my devs moving into JS weirdness unless it was totally necessary. You want simple, clean and readable solutions to business (or technical)…

ES6 supports classes, so it would be the same thing.

> The other thing I find odd is why employers care that someone has deep and existential knowledge of JS?

They are probably just bad interviewers, or the company really doesn't know what it wants. Esoteric knowledge questions are a warning signal that you probably don't want to work there.

Re: They Rejected Us

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the hiring process -- especially in programming -- isn't some golden, concise, dependable standard. It's quite messy, chaotic, and practically completely worthless. The best you can do is sort out the people you absolutely cannot use or don't want. The rest? The one's that you reject because of not matching some part of the interview process but largely are a good fit? They're probably fine, they're…

If I am being honest, as an engineering manager, I really hate to have to fire people. I have done it a few times in my career and I still remember every 15 second block of time in each of the meetings. So my hiring bar is pretty high now. I've had my current team all for 4 years and they are all still doing great.

When I was a younger developer, I did an interview for a contractor and while the candidate was okay, I wasn't convinced (basically he hadn't shown any reason NOT to hire him, but he hadn't put himself in the MUST HIRE category). In follow-up I told the person I was worried by their lack of experience but would move forward with an offer, but I wanted to let them know in advance that I'd quickly move to let them go if it wasn't working.

In my mind this was a great solution: we got to make the hire, he had a chance to prove himself, and we'd not get stuck with a bad match if he had flaws. By letting him know in advance I was ethically clear because he would enter into the situation with his eyes open. He turned it down and my boss was furious with me for saying all that.

Now, some 15 years later, I realize how terrible my view was and how many bullets I blindly dodged. My best managers have all bent over backwards to make a problematic hire work out. Seeing that has always served as a soothing presence on my own occasional anxiety. And in the many interviews I've conducted, people that fall in the "I don't see why NOT to hire them" have outnumbered the "We should totally hire them" about 4:1. Frankly, the interview process is inadequate to give you a good impression of working with someone and their strengths/weaknesses. Heck, I routinely discover new surprises about co-workers after working with them for years.

My past self had been pining for an easy way to fire someone in order to dodge responsibility for the hiring decision. Now I see the hiring decision as not "are they great?" but instead "will I be able to work something out if they aren't great?" because we can't dodge the responsibility nor can we actually reliably be correct in our evaluations.

Unfortunately, my current view doesn't seem to match current hiring practices, where they want everyone to hit the ground running and magically resolve problems that are generally caused by non-technical issues (low staffing, contradictory customer pressures, etc).

Re: They Rejected Us

#235

This is like It Gets Better, but for fragile software engineers who obviously are talented enough to make 6 figures some place else. I understand rejection can feel personal, especially when so much of your life and identity comes from the work you've put into mastering some field, but this doesn't seem like the healthiest mindset. I'm just leaving college now and don't have much of a perspective yet, but the applica…

I'm pretty proud of how I got rejected from Google, how I laid into several of their products as bad and slow and missing important features. Now that they've incorporated most of my feedback into those products I go around and brag about how mad everyone got when I dared to criticize the holy Google during the interview.

Re: They Rejected Us

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but in TS I've found the code is structured differently, to the point where 'prototype' inheritance is effectively obfuscated. The other thing I find odd is why employers care that someone has deep and existential knowledge of JS? Who cares? I would probably object to any of my devs moving into JS weirdness unless it was totally necessary. You want simple, clean and readable solutions to business (or technical)…

ES6 supports classes, so it would be the same thing. > The other thing I find odd is why employers care that someone has deep and existential knowledge of JS? They are probably just bad interviewers, or the company really doesn't know what it wants. Esoteric knowledge questions are a warning signal that you probably don't want to work there.

Most companies, even the best do this.

As for TS I'm thinking interfaces, generics etc.

Re: They Rejected Us

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the hiring process -- especially in programming -- isn't some golden, concise, dependable standard. It's quite messy, chaotic, and practically completely worthless. The best you can do is sort out the people you absolutely cannot use or don't want. The rest? The one's that you reject because of not matching some part of the interview process but largely are a good fit? They're probably fine, they're…

If I am being honest, as an engineering manager, I really hate to have to fire people. I have done it a few times in my career and I still remember every 15 second block of time in each of the meetings. So my hiring bar is pretty high now. I've had my current team all for 4 years and they are all still doing great.

Have you been through a mandatory layoff yet? Imagine you have a great team and you still have to downsize.

Re: They Rejected Us

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. I don't really know what to tell you, except I feel like you may be new to software engineering or have forgotten much of what goes into it. The vast majority of engineers at Google will never lead a software project with the utility and breadth of use as the most popular package manager for mac OS for almost a decade. Most enginee…

I think you answered it yourself. His skill set (running, managing, community, etc) are not what Google needs (as they see it). They need someone who "will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers, but owning the architecture, project management, testing, community support, and coding? No."

If you take the tweet at face value, being dinged for a whiteboard exercise is pretty silly. But people do get hired for specific roles and just having demonstrated you're great at X doesn't mean you should clearly get hired for an only somewhat related Y.

I like to think I'm pretty good at certain things but that doesn't mean I'm a good candidate, especially at a senior level, for lots and lots of roles that, while somewhat related to my skills, aren't really in my wheelhouse.

Re: They Rejected Us

#239
post #103

I still can't get over the fact that Google rejected mxcl, author of homebrew, possibly the most important piece of software on OSX, because he couldn't remember some useless piece of easily-googleable (ha) CS trivia on the spot. Even though they all run it internally. If that isn't the purest, most concentrated form of arbitrary, blind, own-goal beaureaucratic corporate idiocy I don't know what is. And people actual…

Inverting a BST isn’t trivia, it’s a pretty straightforward problem. For the record it’s a warmup problem!

Did you miss a /s?

Re: They Rejected Us

#240
lol Google acquired our company and it was the worst experience of my life

I didn't even apply and I was accepted

this is after other worst experiences

1. getting accepted to Harvard

2. working at an enterprise software shop

the only work experience that wasn't the worst experience in my life---up to that point in time---was working on a web tool for making reports from a database of student responses to a survey

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