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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

331–340 of 1001 posts

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I interviewed and did a few LC problems, it was my experience that most of them were trivially solvable by some combination of implementing an iterator, doing a fold, and maybe adding memoization. Not every problem obviously, but those 3 steps seem to pretty generically cover most easy/mediums that will come up in a coding skills interview. When I got my first job, I didn't know what any of those things…

Yeah I realized you are at a significant disadvantage by not interviewing in python especially when you get some problem that requires parsing some input. IMO it is worth it to spend a couple of weeks practicing python before doing any technical interview.

I interviewed at Amazon and they told me I could pick any language. I chose C and I managed to get the test competed in time, but after I was done the interviewer started asking me questions about how my code worked and it quickly became evident that they didn’t know C. Should have picked Python..

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#332
post #68

> manage yourself and manage your peers, but you also have an engineering manager and a project manager and the CEO is your skip-level manager and the CEO’s brother is also your skip-level manager too This is hilarious and I’m sad I’ve seen versions of this more than once. Overall I enjoyed most of this article but disagree about the objection to behavioral interviews. I think they’re an important part of the modern…

Behavioral interviews select for people who are good at lying. Why else is interview prep a multi-million dollar industry? I can train anyone to tell interviewers exactly what they want to hear. Do you want people who are honest but maybe say things you don't want to hear? Or do you want drones?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#333
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one understands or is willing to research these things anymore. Everyone (or at least everyone who is screaming and being heard) is mumbling points about interest, boom/bust, AI, etc... The reality, in my opinion, the governments have made it so hard to start and maintain a business that the market is not liquid for employment anymore. It's not catastrophic, but rather dead (as not moving). Here are the employment…

What’s so hard about starting and maintaining a business? The hard part is getting people to give you money, but that’s always been true. The business part is a no brainer. Especially when it’s a software business with no office space, inventory or utilities.

The US is one of the most business-friendly countries on the planet (it's why you don't have to provide your employees, you know, rights). No idea what GP is on about.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#334
post #257

This is what crushing of the middle class looks like, the Tech Market is no longer the safe harbor it used to be. This is also what demand destruction looks like. Mathematically we will end up with some sort of wealth tax but that just means it’s in the government’s interest to continue exasperating wealth inequality. A wealth tax won’t save the middle class, it’s more likely to be another nail in the coffin. At leas…

> At least now I no longer have to argue with ‘inflation is good for us’ people. Who has been arguing this?

I know, hard to imagine now but a few years ago it really was a popular theory that wage inflation would exceed price inflation - the continuing rise in tech salaries being the case in point. A belief often held by those with unserviceable student loans that they would rather inflate away. Plus the whole MMT thing which was disturbingly close to becoming official policy is predicated on inflation being hard to start allowing for large amounts of consequence free debt monetization (money printing). My argument was that inflation only appears hard to start because when there is a speculative bubble reducing money velocity at the same time. Mathematically it is impossible to maintain such bubbles forever even if they can last for a very long time. BlackRock will just keep getting bigger until it implodes and disappears taking peoples pension funds with it. How long will that take, I don’t know could be decades, I may not even live long enough to see it. But there is a limit and it will be reached.

The USSR lasted a rather long time despite how dysfunctional it was, and when it disappeared and defaulted on it's obligations the result was a mad scramble and mass poverty. But it also wasn't the end of the world as the prior dysfunctions meant that opportunities still existed.

I wonder if the USSR had not collapsed when it did if they could have possibly afforded to pay old age pensions or the equivalent in lifestyle in the bargain that was made with communism. I.e. how much of Soviet wealth was from people paying in to the system for obligations that the same system could not possibly keep. And is the US Social Security system in a similar state. I think the communists had the idea that upon sufficient revolution money would no longer be needed so state care would effectively be 'free' and or paid for out of the new wealth from finally achieving a communistic utopia. I see this as equivalently fanciful to the US finding a spare $70+ trillion dollars to fund it's currently unfunded obligations.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

I love long takehomes. They're like pet projects, but with clearly defined goals and with people that might even give you a review if you're lucky. I always use them to try a new library or a framework, and often continue improving on them even after they're submitted and evaluated.

Sure, but at best that's unrelated to their value as an interview process. At worst, it's actually making things worse for you, because you're distracted and not doing more interviews.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

4-5 hours... per job. Do you think most people apply to a single job and just get it?

[deleted]

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#337
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…

On the author's resume is a link to a L10 salary at google under "available for employment" and a distinguished engineer at Amazon. So author is in the top 0.01% (or even higher really) of salary expectations for the SWE ladder as I understand.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#338

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…

> I have many friends (in Europe) EU kind of in a recession though. And there's a well known link between interest rates and unemployment. So it's really not surprising to hear that employment in the EU is harder after the ECB raised rates. And good news: they're lowering them now. What really needs explaining is why, despite the unusually strong general US job market[1] for several years now, the US tech market spec…

People were saying things like "Why does twitter need 10,000 employees?" for years and years on end.

We are seeing a reversion to the mean.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#339

The current state of the tech job market, as discussed here, highlights a significant opportunity for grassroots innovation. While we're focusing on the challenges, we might be overlooking the potential for creating new, more resilient models of work and business. Consider the rise of digital cooperatives or platform co-ops. These could provide an alternative to the traditional tech company structure, offering worker…

Except our entire sociopolitical system here doesn't incentivize lofty, crunchy-granola companies. The same reason why we're in this mess in the first place is, well... because we're in this mess in the first place. I.e. you have the causality backwards: we don't need alternative orgs to save us, we need to outlaw the more ruthless, race-to-the-bottom business practices that are not only legal, but encouraged. It's not a coincidence that it's getting harder and harder to complete with big, entrenched players, and a worker co-op can't do much when Google has more money than several small countries combined.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#340
post #303
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a literal graph theorist, I cannot tell you how frustrating it is that (a) nobody seems to understand my work except (b) interviewers use it as a shibboleth to exclude people from jobs that will never need high performance graph algorithms. That, I never get called for these interviews because I don't use react angles or something, but if they did, I'd crush the interview and fall asleep at my desk once they start…

In general, people are completely uninterested in experience that they don't understand, I've found. They don't want to even ask about it because it would showcase that they, gasp, don't know something that you do.

> In general, people are completely uninterested in experience that they don't understand...

It depends on the interviewer. I have colleagues who are risk averse. They want to stick with the tried and true. I on the other hand am a bit of risk taker. If you told me about something that I knew nothing about, and it was a legitimate way to improve things, you will have peaked my curiosity. I would immediately want to know more.

Also, it helps if the hiring person is an experienced dev. In my org, managers do not participate in the hiring of developers, other than background checks and verifying references.

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