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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#241

Post by lostdog »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #189
Peroni wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behavioural interviews are extremely effective provided you do them properly. Running behavioural interviews properly is extremely difficult and takes legitimate skill and experience to orchestrate. It's not something you can pull off by simply following a few rote questions in an interview pack. As a result, most behavioural interviews are ineffective and absolutely riddled with bias.

That's one of the reasons that they are best done by experienced HR personnel. Good HR people are worth their weight in platinum. I used to work with one whose thumbs down became an automatic "no" from the team because we discovered that she was so good at reading people that everyone she didn't like inevitably threw off massive red flags in the rest of the interviews.

I've never met an HR person with this skill, so I bet they are extremely rare.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#242

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

geraldwhen wrote: post #178
scottLobster wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It is crazy how many people will fail a question that boils down to 'write a for loop' despite going to college for 4 years in CS.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#243

Post by megous »

Why did you make me read all this just to tell me that working at 5 failed companies results in not having a financially sound situation, while working at successful ones does? Whaayyyy?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#244

Post by masterj »

photonthug wrote: post #135
slashdave wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is compensation the only consideration in the entire article? I mean, money is nice, but don't you care what you are working on?

This seems unfair, since the author is also complaining loudly about working on crappy problems, ie ones created by incompetence or negligence rather than intrinsic complexity. And that’s extra annoying after many rounds of interviews with rocket science pop quizzes to discover the work is totally amateur hour.

This "everyone is incompetent but me!" archetype is pretty common. Think of tradespeople who come in and always complain about the work the previous person did.

Fixing these types of problems and putting systems in place so they don't regress is the job. Working with others who may not have your same perspective or background is the job.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#245

Post by zhobbs »

reedf1 wrote: post #11

Salary should not be conflated with total comp. Picking the "hyperscale ultra-growth" startup is like winning the lottery, or investing in a donut shop that strikes oil. Working there comes with an implicit investment, survivorship bias makes this seem more consistent than this actually is. It's a mixture of software engineering and entrepreneurship, the two should be separated to properly evaluate the risk.

Seems pretty well known at this point that risk-adjusted comp is higher at bigger stable co's. Personally find them boring, so I tend to work at startup/growth companies, where I can make enough for the lifestyle I like, and I enjoy my work.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#246

Post by ryandrake »

silenced_trope wrote: post #183
levlaz wrote: post #68

> manage yourself and manage your peers, but you also have an engineering manager and a project manager and the CEO is your skip-level manager and the CEO’s brother is also your skip-level manager too This is hilarious and I’m sad I’ve seen versions of this more than once. Overall I enjoyed most of this article but disagree about the objection to behavioral interviews. I think they’re an important part of the modern…

Behavioral interviews seem like the new way to reject candidates based on "culture" without saying that though, because saying a candidate was rejected due to "culture incompatibility" can be taken as a bias or discrimination. I interviewed at Netflix. The market is tough right now and they pay really well. I really wanted to pass. I did great on their tech rounds. Their "culture round" is notoriously hard, people th…

Yea, I thought the whole part on Behavioral Interviews was spot-on and appropriately dark and cynical.

> As far as I can tell, the “behavioral interview” is essentially the same as a Scientology intake session except, you know, for capitalism instead.

> A secondary goal of the “behavioral interview” is personality homogenization where companies want to enforce not hiring anybody “too different” from their current mean personality engram.

It really, REALLY does seem this way at many places.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#247

Post by [deleted] »

ajkjk wrote: post #190
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…

Imo, there are two kinds of programmers: people who can write code to build stuff, and people who can write code to build stuff and are also conversationally fluent in the theory behind writing code. The second group is 5x more useful than the first, and coding interviews are testing which group you're in. Often the first group doesn't think the extra skill of fluency is important, which is fine, think what you want,…

[deleted]

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#248

Post by oxqbldpxo »

There may be better opportunities in Latin America, Europe or emerging markets. Maybe not as sexy, but in the US, there are too many competing for the same seats. In other places there are no Silicon Valleys, and yet the internet is global.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#249

Post by bmitc »

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…

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make.

This is really key. I have applied for jobs before, and then get questions like: "what's your experience with C++ or advanced graph algorithms?". Only that, none of that shows up in my profile or resume. But they act surprised and completely shrug off how a decade of software and other relevant experience is suddenly invalidated. As in, a person who has used and learned a dozen plus languages but only tacitly used C++ suddenly will be a complete invalid when trying to write in C++? Another company advertised that Python experience wasn't needed, but then the first phone interview peppered me with low-level Python implementation questions. Why even bother to interview me? It's a waste of everyone's time.

What it boils down to is that companies have zero idea how to hire. And they have zero idea how to mentor and train, basically for the exact same reasons for why they don't know how to hire.

While tough, it's often a good thing for the applicant as a natural filter. If someone can't hire well, it's not a good place to work. Sometimes it is, but it's relatively rare.

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