361–370 of 583 posts
Author's thoughts on what is broken are: 1. Too much reliance on automated filtering of resumes 2. Companies asking for too much years of experience with specific tech/language/stack 3. Developers dismiss other developers (for using javascript, apparently?) 4. The 'asking about language trivia' interviews are bad, it would be much better to make candidate solve a small task from scratch 5. Restatement of (2) but with…
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> It's easy to write a blog post about how companies need to pay more, but hard to reconcile the reality that if they don't have FAANG cash flows, "market rate" for developers may not be viable, regardless of management's good intentions or lack thereof. Is that a sign of monopoly? When a handful of corporations have vastly more resources than the rest of the industry?
It will be monopoly if you have no other choices but to work for FAANG, which can't be further from reality. On the other hand, complaining about FAANG, only after failing their interviews makes it hard to take that person's intention seriously.
> The general rudeness is ridiculous. I once had an interviewer ask me if I was a wizard with GO, C++, Rust, and C over the phone. Then when I said I had some experience with rust, he immediately cursed at me and hung up. > This experience is fairly common. Is it? I've done a fair bit of interviewing on both sides of the table, and can say with complete honesty I've never heard a curse said in anger in any of them. I…
But I have been laughed at on a phone interview before. It was for a game dev job, and I was told by the recruiter ahead of time "They just need anyone with any game dev experience at all," so I didn't spend too much time studying for the interview. I had developed and released several full games, even popular ones, but they were all 2D Flash web games.
So I was completely unprepared for 30 minutes of being grilled on 3D graphics math and console development. I answered to the best of my ability, and could have done better if I hadn't been misled by the recruiter, but no, it felt like I was being toyed with by the interviewers (kept hearing laughter multiple times after I answered).
I got a different and (equally good) job in the industry and the company that interviewed me ended up closing down about 6 months later, so it worked out for the best anyway.
This person sounded really experienced, so I looked them up on LinkedIn. 7 months at their first company. 9 months at their current company. That's it, aside from non-programming jobs before their bootcamp. The whole thing reads like inventing scenarios that didn't happen or embellishing them. > A bad interview is when you ask them the definition of some specific thing in some specific framework like “Tell me what a…
> > ask (...) “Tell me what a closure in javascript is.” then treat them like they’re stupid if they don’t know. > Not that believable, but okay. To me, it sounds very believable. I have been asked about defining what closures are multiple times. I switched a couple of times between backend, frontend and mobile, and I had to learn bunch of interview questions that never came up in real life. In different communities,…
If I were hiring a mid-level or senior-level front-end engineer and they do not know what a closure is, that'd be a red flag for unfamiliarity with a core language feature. It's on par with not knowing what a decorator is in Python, or reflection in Java.
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I interviewed at a small company just for an internship several years back. It was an iOS position, but again, internship/jr. level. I said I wasn't an expert but wanted to learn and had spent some time developing some basic iOS apps on my own. Guy proceeds to seriously ask me about low-level memory management, i.e. ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) vs. other methods (this was roughly 2013 or so). I attempted to giv…
I have a feeling this will get me a downvote, but I grew up in a very blue collar town and the idea of paying one's dues is not crazy to me. I see a lot of people entering the tech market as if they don't have anything to prove, like their degree says it all. In any industry, you shovel some shit early on, IMO. I was a good programmer, but I got my start racking servers in a data center. I crawled under raised floor…
And being a junior programmer isn’t “having a big corner office” or “being at the top”. It’s literally the bottom of the software engineering ladder
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Somewhat relevantly, a closure isn't a "specific thing in a specific framework." Its a concept that exists in many languages, and has no real relation to frameworks. I would never treat someone like they're stupid in an interview, but being completely unfamiliar with common programming concepts and treating them as irrelevant or trivial things is definitely a red flag.
Adding to this, I think even a little bit of genuine esoterica is okay in an interview process so long as: 1) You're looking for someone with deep knowledge of that subject 2) You don't treat it as an automatic fail when they get it wrong If I'm interviewing for a senior role, and I ask them a few super obscure questions about the language/framework/platform I need them to be an expert on, that serves as a litmus tes…
It would be really hard for me to take the process serious if I was asked that during an interview.
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Let's say you are a forward-thinking manager in a company making artisinal flowerpots. You know tech is the future and will set your company apart, and you want to build a top-tier team to take you there. You are willing to pay twice the compensation per engineer as google. Now a deluge of engineers show up for interviews. How do you tell which ones are top-tier and which ones are third-rate? Even tech companies stru…
Tangent: I've thought about this "bootstrapping dev hiring" problem before (you don't know which candidates are good because you don't have anyone technical to interview them) I wonder if there's a business opportunity for a firm of experienced devs who do nothing but interview devs for other companies
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we hired a confident 2 year out bootcamp grad that was able to pass our interview process and he nearly destroyed our company, twice. There is a reason the interview is difficult to pass, being a dev is a job with an insane amount of responsibility, you do not want bad people in there.
you do not want bad people in there It sounds more like your company has failed to implement robust processes to catch mistakes before they're big problems to me. No individual should have the power to destroy the company except maybe a CTO or a lead sysadmin. For everything else important there should be layers of security and QA checks, with automated sanity checks on config and data for really important stuff. If…
> The general rudeness is ridiculous. I once had an interviewer ask me if I was a wizard with GO, C++, Rust, and C over the phone. Then when I said I had some experience with rust, he immediately cursed at me and hung up. > This experience is fairly common. Is it? I've done a fair bit of interviewing on both sides of the table, and can say with complete honesty I've never heard a curse said in anger in any of them. I…
It reminds me of a recruiter I spoke to who asked me how much experience I had with "winforms". I said "None, I've never heard of that" and she couldn't believe it. She went into this tirade about how five years of experience with winforms was required for this job and how could I not know anything about it, and was I sure I didn't have at least some exposure somehow to winforms somewhere. Very odd experience and the…