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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

261–270 of 1001 posts

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#261
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…

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#262
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…

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…

Yes, you can weed out 50% of incompetent applicants, but that is not the issue. The problem is that the people who will excel in these questions are the ones playing the leetcode game for months. The people with real jobs will pass your question but will do so-so compared to the leetcode gamers, and the second group will get the job. Also, doing exceedingly well in the coding questions doesn't guarantee these people are any good at the real job.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#263
post #249

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 relev…

> 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.

But for people like the guy who wrote that article, eviction eventually becomes a problem. And so many companies can't hire well right now that in a market with declining openings he might not be able to wait for a company that can hire well.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#264

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 but I give the solution away. It's basic shit like factorial or fibonacci. People still fail. Resume fraud is rampant.

EDIT: Another thing: about 80% of the candidates I interview wouldn't be able to pass our Product Manager SQL interview. It's basic shit, but not as basic as the stuff I ask. All the PMs in my current job have better skill than 90% of the backend engineers I interviewed in the last two years. Resume fraud is rampant.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#265
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…

Yeah I had to stop reading when I got to that part. I get making a mistake and adding a zero accidentally but all of the daily compensation values were so far off from anything approaching reality I wasn't going to bother reading whatever other analysis he had for fear it would also be wildly inflated.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#267

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.

Can you give me a couple of examples? I'd like to see where I stand with my knowledge.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#268

I read through this, but I still don't know how the company I work for fits into it. I am a programmer for a Fortune 100 company, but none of the stable company descriptions seem to match my company. Certainly not in terms of compensation. $5,000-$10,000 per day? By my calculation, I make about $800 per work day and don't have any stock options or that kind of stuff. So, the pay (apparently) isn't great, but it is st…

These numbers are absolutely insane. In Poland 300 EUR per day is a good senior level salary. If I earned 10k per day, I'd quit after a year, but a medium house, and live very comfortably just from a 2% interest rate for the rest of my life.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#269
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…

Yeah I feel like this is sour grapes from midwits that aren't as good at programming as they think they are. Sometimes you get a dick interviewer that asks you a trick question, but most interviewers don't care if you get a problem exactly right, they just want to hear you discuss a problem intelligently and show expertise while coding.

I agree, it's sour grapes. These companies grew to be the most powerful in the world, even electing presidents, through these interview processes. The midwit memes can be summarized:

(low IQ) acting on simple instinct vs. (mid IQ) paralyzed by complex rationale vs. (high IQ) acting on simple instinct

The high IQ guys who just do the work to grind LC show enormous signal for being effective software engineers.

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