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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

291–300 of 1001 posts

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#291
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…

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#292

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…

Incidentally, I read a post today which swore that the only way to get hired is NOT to rely on network. Because hiring managers receive so many applications if you don't get your app in the first 24 hours it's guaranteed to be rejected. I think the network thing works only for smaller companies.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#293
post #167

I enjoyed this, but I can offer an anecdotal correction: this person does not know what the Amazon bar raiser interviews are like (or at least, used to be like 10 years ago). They're not behavioral interviews. They're more like "lateral thinking" interviews, like: here's an abstract problem, what ways can you think of to tackle it? And then drilling into the details to see if you're just making up fluff or you can so…

Are the scare quotes around wisdom because you're embarrassed to admit that such a thing exists? ;)

Since it seems you've thought about it a bit, I'm interested to hear your definition of what is / isn't wisdom in an engineering context.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#294

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.

I’ve done some mentoring of CS grads for the past few years. We some times get people with unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process. We advise them to decline the really excessive ones. However, it’s rare to see that.

Often we’ll get people complaining about excessive interview loops, but when they describe the process it adds up to around 4-5 hours total. I think the expectations for interviews became really distorted during the period a few years ago when some companies were hiring anyone willing to do a short interview. Many younger engineers entered the workforce when that was normal and now any amount of interviewing feels unreasonable.

I frequently have to convince people to do simple take-home problems (often 60 minutes or less, I see them because they post them into the chat frequently) because Reddit tells them to decline all take homes. Some days I’m pulling my hair out because someone who has been unemployed for months has valiantly refused yet another take home problem that could have moved their application forward with a minimal time investment.

Another problem I’m seeing a lot is people who halt their job search as soon as they receive a response from a company. We have to repeat over and over again that job searches are a parallel process, not a sequential one. It really hurts candidates who interview with one slow company and then wait around for months for a response before they move on to the next application.

While there are definitely some excessive interview loops out there, the average case honestly isn’t as bad as I read about on the internet.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#295

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.

Exactly. Most of the medium difficulty interview questions are just typical cs algorithms that you are supposed to know. If you are a competent software engineer, it doesn't take long to just brush up and get enough practices for all of them.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#296
I have also been in the industry for 20 years, I get where he is coming from, I also "failed" interviews at GOOG and AMZN for the reason he explained, but I'm not bitter, in fact I feel guilt if anything for how easy my life has been as far as work goes.

Being the guy that actually understands the infrastructure means you never get fired because they know they really need you from time to time.

But overall those of us that got into software and hardware 20 years ago did it because we enjoy it. We are in a much better situation than the faker people who are doing this work out of necessity.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#299
post #86

Hiring people (mostly engineers) has been my full-time job now for about 15 years and I found myself emphatically agreeing with a lot of Matt's criticisms of modern hiring. Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration. Matt's…

> I do need at least one baker capable of drawing a valid orbital configuration.

this way of thinking that contributes to such a toxic job market.

there's too many people applying for too few jobs. that's it.

this bullcrap about inflation, baking bread, interest rates, team building are all symptoms of entitlement.

if you only had 2 applicants you wouldn't be thinking that way.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#300
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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Yea, cause everyone who is already writing C++ is really good at it and good at not writing bugs.
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