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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#391

Post by JackMorgan »

not_wyoming wrote: post #171
mavamaarten wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood why people hate them so much. From the employer side of things it only makes sense to get a feeling for someone's abilities other than an impression based on words alone. You can't believe the amount of shit solutions we've gotten from candidates. We just let you make a very simple kata. A tiny program that generates some console output, you have to refactor it to make it prettier and you need t…

> From the employer side of things it only makes sense to get a feeling for someone's abilities other than an impression based on words alone. I'd like to believe this is true, but it fails to explain why candidates for other business functions don't receive the same scrutiny. I'm not aware of analogous evaluations to get hired to other business roles (e.g. marketer candidates aren't asked to demonstrate a working kn…

Having worked a bunch of other jobs, SWE is an order of magnitude mentally harder than most other jobs. It's like being a translator, poet, detective, and puzzle solver all at once. And you have to do it all collaboratively with a team of other strong-willed, high IQ, low EQ teammates. With weekly deadline pressure. And management who thinks it's taking too long.

Of course my cousin who is a lawyer at Cravath works like 3x more hours harder than I do. She gets paid like 2.5x more too. They just hire tons of people and let the job weed out the bad ones. Most engineering teams can't do that because we're not trying to squeeze 100 hours a week of work out of our engineers.

Of course, plenty of teams do basic work. But plenty of teams with even basic sounding work have to handle an absolutely huge amount of complexity.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#392

Post by ajkjk »

markus_zhang wrote: post #326
ajkjk wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo, there are two kinds of programmers: people who can write code to build stuff, and people who can write code to build stuff and are also conversationally fluent in the theory behind writing code. The second group is 5x more useful than the first, and coding interviews are testing which group you're in. Often the first group doesn't think the extra skill of fluency is important, which is fine, think what you want,…

I think the best coding interview is to test some fundamental CS knowledge. For example: given a scanner, write a simple calculator that deals with precedence and only needs to support +-*/ It shouldn't take a huge amount of time to get a parser done, with BNF or not.

That's okay, but it is testing what it says: facility with a particular part of CS that some people have studied and some people haven't. Can't hurt, though, and it's the sort of think that ought to be in everyone's toolbox, although it isn't.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#393

Post by ajkjk »

cortesoft wrote: post #327
ajkjk wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo, there are two kinds of programmers: people who can write code to build stuff, and people who can write code to build stuff and are also conversationally fluent in the theory behind writing code. The second group is 5x more useful than the first, and coding interviews are testing which group you're in. Often the first group doesn't think the extra skill of fluency is important, which is fine, think what you want,…

There is also a third group, who can't do well at either task.

Oh sure but would you even want to call them "programmers" then?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#394

Post by ieie3366 »

It all makes sense once you consider a tech company to be a money printer.

Once the initial builders have built it, it will keep on printing money barring some absolute mismanagement. This attracts the grifters, the useless people, the talkers, you know the type. These people don’t care about building. They don’t care about the product. They care about their own self-interests and the money printer is a way to advance those interests.

The inevitable end result? Enshittification.

The only way to avoid this is to have an actual engineer as CEO. See Meta, Tesla, Nvidia

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#395

Post by blurbleblurble »

> The trick with “behavioral interview” is there are no true good answers. They want to watch you squirm.

This gave me flashbacks to my first interview for a developer role at a large corporation.

I swear the hiring manager didn't even listen to my answer to his "hard workplace moments question", he just immediately told me that I hadn't really answered it. I asked him for clarification then gave another significantly different scenario with a totally different outcome that I thought answered the question pretty well. This time he said "that sounds like the same situation as before. Why did you let it happen again?" At that point I froze: I'm not the most emotionally intelligent person but I can usually sense when people are messing with me.

(Never mind that my autobiographical memory is very impaired thanks to the aphantasia, these questions are an extreme lift)

My conclusion was that he didn't really care much about an earnest discussion of "hard workplace moments" as much as he cared to mess with my head and see how I'd react when faced with frustrating large-corporation power dynamics that are common from day to day.

In hindsight, I think if I wanted to pass that part of the interview I'd have needed to calmly show a little more assertiveness and confidence myself rather than freezing up in the face of simulated everyday workplace gaslighting.

At the following interviews people seemed lethargic, anxious and detached. When I didn't get an offer I was actually pretty relieved.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#396

Post by linotype »

carabiner wrote: post #269
zeroCalories wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I feel like this is sour grapes from midwits that aren't as good at programming as they think they are. Sometimes you get a dick interviewer that asks you a trick question, but most interviewers don't care if you get a problem exactly right, they just want to hear you discuss a problem intelligently and show expertise while coding.

I agree, it's sour grapes. These companies grew to be the most powerful in the world, even electing presidents, through these interview processes. The midwit memes can be summarized: (low IQ) acting on simple instinct vs. (mid IQ) paralyzed by complex rationale vs. (high IQ) acting on simple instinct The high IQ guys who just do the work to grind LC show enormous signal for being effective software engineers.

Professionally, I’ve never used anything most LC problems would signal for. I have libraries for that.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#397

Post by __loam »

tdesilva wrote: post #386

Well this was an entertaining take on the job market. tl;dr he's salty other people ended up better off doing the same work for other companies, based on views of tech compensation that are very divorced from reality: > I look at my own place in the world compared to people who just started at Apple or Microsoft 20 years ago then never left, and now they have made eight figures just over the past 4 years while my lif…

This guy is definitely giving delulu vibes but I think there's some truth to the idea that there are inequities in the market. People who work at FAANGs will often make more money and do less work than the foreign contractors in places like Poland and Ukraine getting paid $35k a year for the same work. It's worth talking about because I honestly don't understand why bay area engineers are paid 3 times as much as their European counterparts or 6 times as much as their co-workers in India. Offshoring should work but it often doesn't.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#398

Post by dakiol »

ajkjk wrote: post #190
caesil wrote: post #53

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept…

Imo, there are two kinds of programmers: people who can write code to build stuff, and people who can write code to build stuff and are also conversationally fluent in the theory behind writing code. The second group is 5x more useful than the first, and coding interviews are testing which group you're in. Often the first group doesn't think the extra skill of fluency is important, which is fine, think what you want,…

I think there’s another group: people who can come up with solid code by using search tools.

I code, sure, but I will never come up with a custom solution for any non trivial problem. I know where to find appropriate solutions (the best ones) because I’m aware of what I don’t know (I read a lot of tech books). You cannot test this in the classic tech interview (because I would googling 75% of the time).

The final result is: you want good code or not? How I come up with it should be secondary.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#399

Post by __loam »

kredd wrote: post #64

It really sucks right now, but recent grads and juniors are suffering the most right now, to my understanding. There's an over-production of CS grads, as the industry looked very lucrative, so a lot of people decided to go software engineering route. It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do…

The under hiring of junior employees and the unwillingness to invest in training is a problem across the economy. It's a kind of tragedy if the commons but also the unfortunate result of insisting we need more software engineers for 10 years.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#400

Post by ieie3366 »

irrational wrote: post #253

I read through this, but I still don't know how the company I work for fits into it. I am a programmer for a Fortune 100 company, but none of the stable company descriptions seem to match my company. Certainly not in terms of compensation. $5,000-$10,000 per day? By my calculation, I make about $800 per work day and don't have any stock options or that kind of stuff. So, the pay (apparently) isn't great, but it is st…

He most likely means the entire companies budget. So a small-ish company might spend $5k a day on their dev team’s salaries
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