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Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

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Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#281

Post by rhizome »

cortesoft wrote: post #149
eanzenberg wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do you need to write palindrome functions for your job? Checking substring in a string is a 1 liner in languages like python. I was at a final interview with FAANG. One question asked was to load a csv. I used pandas, it's a 1 liner. You could see the wretched face of the interviewer since he was expecting a with open() as f: do_some_shit and kept pushing me to write this on the board. I looked at him and s…

So what is the interviewer supposed to do to find out if you can code? They want to give you a simple, straightforward task to see how you code. Of course, every simple, straightforward task is going to have an existing tool to do the job, but they aren't looking for a solution to parsing CSV, they are looking to see you code. They can't ask you a complicated problem, because they don't have the time (nor do you) to…

They want to give you a simple, straightforward task to see how you code.

Overgeneralized at best, LOLworthy at worst. Does this include palindrome questions for Ruby that require the use of linked lists? Because I had that from a CTO of a couple-hundred person company not two months ago.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#282

Post by spyspy »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #255

Don't people get job offers anymore from someone they used to know that moved to another company and then like "hey I know this really great guy who works at XYZ, we should definitely get him here"? That is literally how every job I've moved to happened, except for the very first one right after being a student. That's the only job I ever remember having to "interview" for. The rest were just through established soci…

Not all of my friends work for places I want to work, and any reasonably sized company is going to throw you through the ringer anyway in the name of "consistency."

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#283

Post by [deleted] »

hermitdev wrote: post #176
crdoconnor wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird, I've heard plenty of stories about this kind of thing but when I sat on the hiring side and interviewed for intermediate roles (couldn't even afford senior) I didn't come across anybody who was stumped and simply couldn't code. There were people who were bad at (possibly some because they were under pressure), it but nobody who couldn't do it at all. I wasn't giving out a trivial question either.

I remember interviewing a candidate that didnt even know what a binary tree was (context was big-O complexity of algorithms). That interview was really bad. Left the candidate in tears (which was not intended, but I think of their realization they werent going to get the job), and me annoyed at the waste of my time (should have been caught in phone screen instead of on site).

[deleted]

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#284

Post by tacon »

sharemywin wrote: post #247
pm90 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For all the claims of companies that they only hire the "top 10%" or whatever of engineers, the interview process is often optimized to the benefit of the median engineer. This really seems out of necessity. There are going to be a lot more qualified median engineers rather than superstar coders, so it makes sense to optimize your hiring pipeline to assess these folks. In my experience, most of the "top 10%" hires…

I can just imagine a room full of top 10% engineers/architects...No we need to do it like this...Well, no did you think of this obscure use case... what about performance? I think...should we...fast forward a year later and the company went belly up because everyone was trying to be best and piss on each other to prove who was top...top. At least when middle managers do it they're only interested in who gets credit f…

That room sounds like every room at Netflix, except it works just fine.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#285

Post by Clubber »

chillydawg wrote: post #76
haskellandchill wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is a myth, what do you estimate the figure is? I think under 10%, maybe under 5%. I have significant experience interviewing senior, junior, and mid-range candidates. 99% of my candidates can code, as in iterate over collections, write case statements, and call functions. I've only had one junior candidate who couldn't code at all. Sloppiness is rampant, but sloppy code that gets things done is what…

It's not a myth. I see it when recruiting for my teams. My sample size is too small to give a proportion, but it's enough that not having tests would be a total waste of my and their time since I'd have to fire them on day 1.

I'm amazed you can't tell an imposter just by talking to them.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#286

Post by lostcolony »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #210
lostcolony wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I've sat on the hiring side. I've seen impressive resumes. I've had reasonable discussions with people. And then I give them a very, very trivial coding exercise (a take home, they're free to Google, do it on their own computer, in their own IDE, in their professed preferred language), in a time frame that while constrained is still plenty...and the result is -terrible-. I can try and come up with reasons…

I did DB work forever never hearing ACID. I initially heard of it certainly from slashdot or hackernews, and it only ever ended up coming up due to not DB work, but DB analysis of tools. Once you start working on a particular database, and are working on all of the specific details of that db, how often does ACID come into things, really? It just doesn't.

Hence the followup question about consistency. I purposely gave a useless and very inaccurate answer as an example (and one I am paraphrasing from an actual candidate).

If you legitimately did the work without picking up -any- of the terminology, -and- respond confidently to questions you should know you don't know the answer to (rather than admitting ignorance and asking for follow-up questions, or declaring assumptions, i.e., "Well, I would assume it has to do with the behavior that if a constraint is violated or something similar in a transaction, the transaction will be rolled back instead of committing"), I don't want you. Because it means you both did not have formal training in, AND didn't seek out information or knowledge in the domain you were expected to be -senior level- in.

And while atomicity and durability are just characteristics of a relational DB (and so adminning one doesn't really require you to understand them), isolation and consistency both have definite relevance, because the isolation level is configurable, and that affects the consistency guarantees of the system. I expect someone saying they were a -senior level DBA- to be able to talk intelligently about those behaviors, and yes, to understand the words, because just reading the docs would have introduced the words.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#287

Post by watty »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #255

Don't people get job offers anymore from someone they used to know that moved to another company and then like "hey I know this really great guy who works at XYZ, we should definitely get him here"? That is literally how every job I've moved to happened, except for the very first one right after being a student. That's the only job I ever remember having to "interview" for. The rest were just through established soci…

Sure, I'd guess the majority of engineering roles above junior are through networking of some sort. "Surely if you have skills"... well, what % of programmers out there fit this description? It's even weirder to think that every software developer has enough skills to have people knocking at their door.

In my situation I moved to a new city for family reasons with zero connections. I had a stable job working remote but put some feelers out and found a better job in my city by randomly applying.

It's actually weird you find it weird.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#288

Post by fuzzygroup »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #49
larrik wrote: post #30

I've been involved in hiring senior engineers for a while now, and here's a few counterpoints: 1) Ruby is hard to get a job in, so you are off to a rough start. 2) A lot of people with lots of experience actually can't code for crap. Do you know how many python developers I see that don't know the difference between a tuple and list? Like, how could you be a real dev if you never even wondered why sometimes you use […

I think the main point from a candidate perspective is that long, unusual or difficult interview processes are fine as long as we have already decided we really want to work for you (that is you are Trello or SpaceX or some amazing startup we love) otherwise, just as you are faced with picking a rose from a faceless mass of candidates so are we faced with picking a decent place to work from a faceless mass of mission…

Oh wow that's really, really good -- turn recruiting into fix bugs in an OSS project. Nice! That's good for everyone.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#289

Post by ufmace »

LandR wrote: post #12

> Number 1: It Takes Longer than Ever to Get Hired Last twice I've looked for a developer job, I got offered a position and was hired within 2 weeks. > No one believes that anyone can actually code. Quite rightly, most devs can't code. > Extensive homework is now normal. Not been my experience, I've done some homework assignments but none were ever more than 1 hours work (and then even the standard of the tests were…

Agreed on most of your points. On recruiters though, I'm on board with finding like 90% of them sleazy, pushy, no knowledge of the industry, don't care about the company or the candidate, just want to complete a placement and make a buck. But I've had mixed at best results trying to find a job without one by applying directly to companies.

For my last job search, I emailed applications to like a dozen companies in my area from the last HN Hiring thread, and heard back from like 2 I think, none of which went anywhere. Maybe they're too slow, didn't like me for some reason, found someone better, etc, I don't know. When I started talking to recruiters, the interviews started coming pretty fast, and I had multiple on-sites and offers in a couple of weeks. It's like, sleazy though they can be, there's a distinct lack of movement in the process without the energy of recruiters.

So I come down more on work with them, but don't trust them too much, know their tricks and watch your back.

And speaking of the author's points - a week-long coding test? A month to complete the "homework project"? Who's doing that? Nope, I'm passing on those companies. A couple of hours is no problem, but pay me if you expect multiple weeks worth of work.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#290

Post by sateesh »

In my opinion the interview process for senior position should not be solely focused on the technical aspects and coding alone. Coding is indeed a necessary requirement, but as one gains experience it is important he/she can not only code but mentor junior devs, instill good development practices in the team, can effectively take a high level spec (say from Product management) and break it into tasks facilitating an iterative development, and can communicate well. Though it is a technical role, as one gains experience these aspects become all the more crucial
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