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“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

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Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#331

Post by randomNumber7 »

anon9001 wrote: post #303
asdff wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this a few times in my career and have had to start slowing myself down at times. If I deliver in a day instead of the expected two for example, I don't get that second day off, I get twice as much work and get paid the same for it. The harder I work, the less I make. If they want me to bust my ass and sacrifice sleep I need to be given hazard pay.

You're right, and as a result I try to work no more than 4 hours a day, preferably less. I take every possible opportunity to extend timelines, create buffer, and reduce scope. I'm highly incentivized to farm as much time as possible, so that's what I do. I try to target obscure projects that I already know how to do, where there's an assumption that nobody really knows how to do it because it's obscure. Complexity a…

What brought me to do something similar in a former job was, that I realized it only hurts my coworkers when I do more than the average.

The management would say to everyone with performance below average something like: "How can we help you to improve your performance? What do you plan to improve your performance?"

The result was that most people stopped working once they reached their goals because otherwise they would only increase the average^^

I read a lot during this job xD

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#332

Post by randomNumber7 »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #59
dx87 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I burned myself out really bad trying to go above and beyond for a few years at various companies. Just ended up frustrated, making no more money than people coasting in the same position, and still got laid off during downsizing instead of the people who spent time playing office politics and going out to happy hour with the supervisor. I feel kind of guilty now though, because I actually managed to get hired…

Working hard for a raise/promotion is a losing strategy. Working hard so you can change jobs every 18-24 months with big salary jumps is rather easy to do consistently. Trying to get a promotion is deciding to compete for one position in one company with essentially every qualified candidate in the world. It’s easy to see how looking for a better job every so often has better odds for success.

A friend of mine just doubled his salary. He wanted to resign and look for an other job, but his company offered him double salary.

If your work makes you an important person in the company, you have a strong basis for negotiation. Most people just don't use it...

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#333

Post by Nextgrid »

asdff wrote: post #241
adrianN wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming is a pretty latency sensitive application, and yet Amazon is working hard on moving that to the cloud: https://www.amazon.com/luna/landing-page While there are some things that are even more latency sensitive, I think that could become a very small niche in the near future.

I've tried out Google's beta with assasin's creed, and the results weren't promising. I had gigabit fiber and while it worked pretty well for the most part, I still got quite a few gamebreaking lag spikes and fps slowdowns. It stuttered like a youtube video: freezing, then resuming in 144p quality which made the in game text completely unreadable on my screen. And that's on a beefy internet connection, imagine the si…

I've ran my own cloud gaming VM on AWS and with an enterprise connection (1ms latency to the AWS datacenter) it's been good enough to play multiplayer shooting games and maintain a positive kill/death ratio against those who play locally.

Maybe the problem isn't that it's impossible per-se but that the consumer-grade services underprovision their machines/bandwidth, or that consumer-grade gigabit fiber isn't actually that good (or problems in the "last mile" like using Wi-Fi instead of good old Ethernet)?

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#334

Post by viraptor »

llukas wrote: post #175
ip26 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are trying to hire more outside of California in order to lower wages across the board This could turn out to be a very good thing for the country. It's a social & economic problem if all the money & opportunity are squeezed into just one metro.

Why did you assume those jobs will stay in US?

Have you seen the offers for remote work? Almost every one is "remote (us citizen)", "remote (same timezone)", "remote (monthly onsites)". Unless the companies are prepared to open whole divisions with colocated management in other countries, the jobs are staying local.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#335

Post by pbourke »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #137
echelon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our industry feels like it's in the decline of the Roman Empire right now. Our craft is becoming arcane: Microsoft is building VSCode for the cloud. Few people own desktop computers anymore. Apple is locking down MacOS to signed binaries. Soon we'll all have thin clients and will write software in the cloud for the cloud. Few will be able to learn how to engineer at home anymore - you'll have to go to a university or…

> Our industry feels like it's in the decline of the Roman Empire right now. .... And here I am, writing a desktop native app that targets a small niche of users, with no marketing, no advertising, and we've had our strongest year yet, and overall usage just grows slowly year over year. Maybe it's how you think things ought to be that is misaligned with reality, rather than "the decline of the Roman Empire".

Looks like Ardour is open source. How do you make money?

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#336

Post by landtuna »

solipsism wrote: post #211
landtuna wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that an offer? :) https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimhunziker/ One hit was for making machine guns target humans better. (I rejected the in-person interview.) Another dropped me because they wanted cloud experience. A YC company changed the job from remote to SF only before we talked.

Where's the 20 YoE? Your linkedin says 10. And it only shows 6. What did you do between 1998 (when you earned your degree) and 2014 when you started doing the consulting? That's a super long time to leave undocumented. That makes potential employers nervous. What subject was your degree in? It's strange that it doesn't say. I think you should take a look at the resume of other people with 20 years of experience in th…

I think it must be limiting what you can see to connections if you're not a subscriber to the LinkedIn service. That's all in there!

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#337

Post by mgkimsal »

prh8 wrote: post #53

I was just griping about this earlier today. I'm in the interview process with a company, who has talked to me before, after being referred internally to do so. I've talked to them about technical problems I've solved in the past, discussed problem solving and approaches to optimization and architecture. Interview process has gone really well. They said the last thing is a code test, that they do through Hackerrank.…

I haven't used Hackerrank specifically, but some other similar tools, and yeah, those were my exact feelings. Self-taught, been doing software professionally for more than 25 years, and have rarely ever needed anything close to the types of math/compsci problems these services test you on.

The 'sit with someone for an hour' are far more indicative of how you'd work with someone because... you're working with them. 2 years ago I did a "remote pair code test" with the team lead for about 30 minutes. I think I got most of the 'test' done in half the expected time, and we talked about where/why I cut corners, how you'd test it, what sorts of things you need to keep in mind to address edge cases, etc. I got to see what working with the team lead was like in that case, and... ultimately, it wasn't much different after I got the gig.

Good luck to you in your hunting!

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#338

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

sn41 wrote: post #3
runawaybottle wrote: post #2

We’re just simply at scale. There’s too many people at scale so the dumb tests show up. Take a look at public school standardized tests. That’s basically where we are at with tech because we can’t handle scale.

I will not say I don't know why you are downvoted, since such remarks get downvoted here. But can't we look at an alternative model where some such standardized test is used to test basic competence, and then trainees get 2 week training on the job? Afterwards, we can select a subset based on specific tests designed for the job, rather than the usual interview questions. How many of us have actually used dynamic prog…

I'd rather take leetcode than have to quit my current job and have a two weeks long interview after which I might well be unemployed.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#339

Post by learc83 »

chii wrote: post #62
alpha_squared wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if there were a certification authority that could claim that professionals are, indeed, competent in X, Y, Z within software? And, of course, that authority would need to be recognized by A, B, C companies. That'd certainly skip the endless, often mind-numbing, repetitiveness of technical interviews (especially for those with many years of experience) and can jump straight to culture/team/behavior fit. This is…

i would agree a universally accepted accreditation organization, like the American Medical Association, can make interviewing for technical competency easy. But like with AMA, they would (and does) gatekeep. What kind of policy can the organization be instituted with so that gatekeeping is impossible? Doctors _should_ be a dime a dozen. They should not cost so much - because their services are valuable and therefore,…

> Doctors _should_ be a dime a dozen. They should not cost so much - because their services are valuable and therefore, more of them should be produced to make medical costs lower.

Physician salaries make up about 8% of medical costs. And even if you doubled medical school class size, you wouldn’t get 2x the doctors because there aren’t enough resident slots available.

And even if you had enough slots available, you’d still need to guarantee high salaries afterwards. Most people who are smart/driven enough to be doctors aren’t going to work 80-100 hours in a high stress position for 3 years if they are only going to come out making $80k.

So the only way to drastically increases (3x,4x) the supply of doctors is to drastically decrease the standard of training.

So you reduce residency down to 1 year and you triple the number of doctors. Now you’ve reduced the quality of doctors, and you save people less 5% in healthcare costs, but no one even notices because that number gets drowned out by the continued rise in the other 92% of healthcare costs.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#340

Post by pishpash »

echelon wrote: post #55
decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

Our industry feels like it's in the decline of the Roman Empire right now. Our craft is becoming arcane: Microsoft is building VSCode for the cloud. Few people own desktop computers anymore. Apple is locking down MacOS to signed binaries. Soon we'll all have thin clients and will write software in the cloud for the cloud. Few will be able to learn how to engineer at home anymore - you'll have to go to a university or…

Welcome to MBA-run tech.
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