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For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

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Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#261

Post by vonmoltke »

fapjacks wrote: post #193
ryandrake wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of interviewing for practice, and would do it myself, but I only have 10 vacation days a year to blow. How do you manage it? Pretend to be sick? (naughty, naughty)

Most companies are pretty flexible about interviewing you if you ask, and also my work hours are flexible where I'm at, in addition to my already being able to work from anywhere at least some of the time (in fact this is near the top of the list of non-negotiable things I look for in a job). I can work around an interview pretty easily, especially because I'm already nearby. I have only had to take vacation to inter…

That's great if you live in an area with a bunch of companies you want to work at. If, like me, you don't you end up having to use vacation days and make up excuses for short-notice one and two day absences.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#262

Post by logfromblammo »

selimthegrim wrote: post #88
logfromblammo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only that were true. I'm a U.S. national event champion in Div. C Science Olympiad (Road Scholar), and I not only have to deal with whiteboard nonsense all the time, but also, the spouse never really believes that I know how to get anywhere from anywhere else. (Sure, argue with Siri/Google, rather than allowing that I might possibly know which direction north is.) Credentials are only as good as the trust other pe…

Look basically none of the top tech schools or Ivies blink an eye at Science Olympiad especially in comparison to IMO or IOI or IPhO - besides the actual difficulty of the events you have to consider the relative sizes of the pool they are drawing from as well.

That's true. I got rejected from at least one top tech school for not being great enough on paper, despite all the medals from my high school non-athletic competitive extracurricular activites clinking on my chest. If I ever become even mildly successful, I eagerly await the opportunity to throw that back in their faces.

But for now, and the foreseeable future, it would appear that their decision has been validated. Although I'm not entirely certain whether that is because I am not actually good enough as a person to claw my way into the upper middle class on my own merits, or because my accumulated credentials are not prestigious enough for a gatekeeper to lower one of the ladders low enough for me to jump for it.

Like it or not, there may be people out there blackholing my resume just because it doesn't have the right university name on it, or because the year I graduated is in the wrong millennium, or because it doesn't have the right company names on it.

There's nothing that any of us can do about it individually. Stopping that kind of useless credentialism by employers is squarely in the domain of a cartel enforcer--union, professional association, or government--and even then it might not stick.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#263

Post by logfromblammo »

argonaut wrote: post #149
logfromblammo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only that were true. I'm a U.S. national event champion in Div. C Science Olympiad (Road Scholar), and I not only have to deal with whiteboard nonsense all the time, but also, the spouse never really believes that I know how to get anywhere from anywhere else. (Sure, argue with Siri/Google, rather than allowing that I might possibly know which direction north is.) Credentials are only as good as the trust other pe…

I'm pretty sure the parent poster was talking about things like the IOI, IMO, etc., which are ridiculously difficult and prestigious and are competitions that occur on an international scale. Each nation only sends a handful of competitors. Not the "Division C Science Olympiad," which is US high-school based.

Well, doing a high school olympiad didn't get me into the university I wanted, so why would a university-level olympiad get anyone into the job they want?

It doesn't work as a credential unless it actually produces results.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#264

Post by vonmoltke »

kbart wrote: post #251
xvolter wrote: post #127

I've seen articles about technical interviews too many times to count, and while I personally don't believe whiteboarding is a good tool for interviewing and don't use it when I perform interviews, I do believe that any good engineer should be able to whiteboard answers with relative ease. The gripe really is dependent on the specific questions, however if you've worked with a technology stack you should be able to r…

" if you've worked with a technology stack you should be able to recall the function names, parameter order, and basic pseudo code syntax to write answers to questions." That's not true unless you work with very narrow technology or single framework. For example, good luck trying to remember all these POSIX API functions. I don't even try to remember mundane things by heart, because it takes a precious and very limit…

"Never memorize something you can look up" -- Albert Einstein

"I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to remember!" -- Professor Henry Jones

Two of the pearls of wisdom I live my life by. Actually, most engineers do. That's why huge books of nothing but formulas, lookup tables, and reference data exist.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#265

Post by cellularmitosis »

argonaut wrote: post #152
yarou wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably one of the most insensitive posts I've ever seen written on here. There are many people who have crippling anxiety and social phobias, and your post chalks that up to them having an "attitude".

Not to be harsh or anything, but this kind of proves the point. Crippling anxiety and social phobia are not things I would want in an employee, all else equal, because they will need to be able to communicate in meetings and present findings/work to different teams / executives. Reply: baseline social comfort is not a generic personality type.

That's not how anxiety works. You are crippled while interacting with strangers, not with teammates you've spent 8 hours per day warming up to.

You should really give anxiety sufferers a shot. There are some real gems there which you are dismissing out of hand.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#267

Post by vonmoltke »

frcknfrckn wrote: post #215
p4wnc6 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you can't "just as easily" run the code test. The code test is unreliable -- bad developers who overfit their knowledge to trivia make it through. The code test also causes the really good developers to simply reject you, so you don't even get a chance to hire them, or even find out who they are. You're basically saying you want to lop off the bottom 60% of an imagined Normal distribution. Except…

Gonna have to disagree on that one. If some fraction of that bottom 60% gets through, that's perfectly fine - this is only the first step after all, and there are real interviews still to come. And if this mystical top 5% can't spare the ten minutes to run through what is essentially an interviewing captcha - for a job they were obviously interested in enough to apply for in the first place - then how do I know they…

If I knew what your test was going in it wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, I don't know if I'm getting your 15-minute competency screen or, say, Virtu's 3-hour borderline impossible beating until I actually log in to take it. Since the latter seems to be more common than the former, it pushes me to reject you up-front unless I am desperate.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#268

Post by vonmoltke »

kelukelugames wrote: post #181
hotcool wrote: post #142

My comments on HN get shadowbanned for no discernable reason. Does that count?

HN has shadowban?

Sort of. There is a mechanism to "kill" a user's posts; these are posts that get flagged "[dead]". A logged-in user with showdead checked in their profile can still see them, though. In fact, as of several months ago users can "vouch" for dead posts that should not be dead.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#269

Post by VikingCoder »

jblow wrote: post #157
VikingCoder wrote: post #39

I realized something a while back... My entire career, if I've made it to an on-site interview, I've only had one company NOT make me a job offer. That interview, I was asked to do something using recursion. (Ug.) The next interviewer asked me to reverse a singularly linked list, and because my brain was still in recursion land, I tried to do it recursively. Blame the jet lag, okay? Immediately after I sucked at that…

Except ... reversing a singularly-linked list recursively is trivial. If you can't do this, you are not qualified at basic manipulation of data structures and you should fail the interview if they want someone with basic competence in data structure manipulation. Sorry but that is how it is.

Yeah, you're not getting the point of my story.

I know it's trivial. It is trivial. I can do it in my sleep. I used to write Pascal code, back before all these Generics and Templates, and I had to write data structures the old fashioned way.

What I'm telling you is that the jet lag got to me. This is like when you can't remember the name of the actor who played Batman in Batman Begins. Or when you can't remember what year your mother was born in. Or you can't remember the capital of the state you're travelling to. Or you're multiplying 7*8 and write down 42 in a momentary lapse. It was a completely "DUH" moment.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#270

Post by frcknfrckn »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #253
frcknfrckn wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be so quick to speak for all developers. Most good developers I've encountered are willing to put some effort in to find the right job.

HackerRank-like lazy, commodity evaluation is not remotely close to "put[ting] some effort in to find the right job." It's very critical that we don't allow people to make the false comparison between actual interview effort and daft HackerRank time-wasting. In fact, doing the emotionally difficult task of rejecting an employer who tries the HackerRank commodity nonsense represents putting in more legitimate effort t…

Ha ha! Wow, that does sound difficult. You're a real trooper.
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