Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to get a job while having a job?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 50 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job while having a job?

#41

Post by paulie_a »

scarface74 wrote: post #34
pmikesell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious to know what you think a better way would be?

It’s not really that difficult. I have a simplified skeleton of class that is similar to the problems we solve every day and failing unit tests. They have to make the unit tests pass. Then I give them a second set of requirements and they have to make the second set of tests pass without breaking the first set.

Honestly, tech interviews are really simple to conduct. Give a few challenges. See if they stumble hard. See how they interact (quite frankly the most important aspect if they have any technical experience). Give hints if necessary. Interviews are stressful enough, so a small nudge is fine. But you can definitely tell who is capable, and those that don't have the experience pretty quickly.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job while having a job?

#42

Post by teemo91 »

souprock wrote: post #31

There shouldn't be many all-day interviews. If you are honest on your resume and there is a phone screen, your chances with the interview should be pretty decent. The company doesn't like all-day interviews any more than you do. Multiple highly-paid people get distracted from their normal duties to interview you. With both you and the employer having a cost to bear, the interview should mean that both you and the emp…

Sadly, this is not true. I live in the bay area and most startups here, need you in person for their day of interviews. The industry standard seems to be 1 soft skill/ HR discussion + 1 technical phone screen + 1 day of technical interviews(4-6). And as optimistic as one can be, it's hard to find the right (job + company + people) combo in the first try, since it's hard to judge certain aspects from a HR call and a technical interview which is usually a 45-60min call where most of the time is spent coding. This leads you to interview in-person at places where you might not like the company culture/ team/ leadership/ commute/ etc. It is true that a lot of resources go into interviewing from the company's perspective but it is also pretty much the same for an interviewee.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job while having a job?

#43

Post by ccore »

jurassic wrote: post #13

It sounds like you are applying cold and going through the process used to filter the unwashed masses (e.g. new bootcamp grads, college grads, career changers with no network, fakers of all stripes). There are some diamonds in the rough there but it's no surprise they put that candidate population through the ringer to make sure they don't waste their engineering staff's time screening duds. If you've been working fo…

I am actually guilty of this- I'm trying to overcome my fear of being more friendly at work. I'm seen as the serious guy who doesn't talk to anyone (outside of work-related matters). The result of me not being more social for 10 years since college means that I don't really get contacted by colleagues, and I always have to go in cold with a new job. I don't have any "voucher" people.

TBH the whole thing about getting ahead more easily to jobs through common friends, man does it remind me of nightclubs. I don't care about having a personal entourage, but the industry seems to be forcing me to. I'm just trying to live a happy career and life without needing to be popular and stuff.

And while I do have friends I've made in high school, they're a small group and they've never given me good leads. I don't generally see them as people I rely on for jobs. They're in totally different work fields and the kind of people who can't tell programmers apart from IT.

Why wasn't building a good network second nature with me, I don't know. But want to know why I don't have the intuition, and how to fix that.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job while having a job?

#44

Post by ccore »

jurassic wrote: post #19
twoquestions wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it sounds like building your network is a more valuable thing to do than study for all-day interviews. However, why should some well-connected person want to talk to some bozo who's only giving them the time of day to job hunt? Especially in a career like ours that isn't dominated by talking like sales is?

You should study. You still have to have the chops to pass a full-day onsite. Having a contact from your network trying to bring you in just cuts down on the amount of pointless hoop-jumping. Building and maintaining a professional network is something you should be doing all the time. If you wait until you need a job to network you are doing it wrong.

Well then I must be doing it wrong because all I want to do after work is relax and not talk to anyone and sometimes play video games. I still want to be recognized for the work that I do but apparently that's not enough.

Maybe I have Asperger's or something else, but this whole thing about relying on connections to get jobs more easily doesn't come naturally to me.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job while having a job?

#45

Post by ccore »

geobmx540 wrote: post #12
wan23 wrote: post #7

Some kind of accreditation for software would save our industry so much time. It's crazy how many hours we spend asking and answering the same basic questions over and over. Imagine if we could focus on the important stuff in interviews!

Accreditation just acts as another "has a college degree" filter. There is already a proliferation of certifications that people can attain if they wish, that may or may not help them in specific instances that try to "give you a minimum level of knowledge", but really that just means the questions you get asked assume you know that - ie they are harder and incorporate your algorithm knowledge, instead of specificall…

And the bar exams are just another "has a college degree" filter too, but they've been proven to work as a useful metric, and they are overseen by an association of professionals. And legal knowledge is way more open-ended than software knowledge, with far more subtleties in its practice. Yet. The bar exam somehow works.

>Why can't we have some sort licensing board like a medical board so that you prove you can code

Too many software developers have a strong aversion to regulatory bodies in their own profession. That really is the issue here.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job while having a job?

#46

Post by quickthrower2 »

jurassic wrote: post #13

It sounds like you are applying cold and going through the process used to filter the unwashed masses (e.g. new bootcamp grads, college grads, career changers with no network, fakers of all stripes). There are some diamonds in the rough there but it's no surprise they put that candidate population through the ringer to make sure they don't waste their engineering staff's time screening duds. If you've been working fo…

I find I usually don't want to work for the companies people I know work at, and when I have been vouched I still need to go through every round. I'm not in the US, so there is no FAANG jobs. So YMMV

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job while having a job?

#47

Post by james_s_tayler »

kentosi wrote: post #6

I just went through this so let me give you my thoughts/experience. Separate work and job-hunting as two different skill sets in your mind. Use any note-taking tool of your choice (I used EverNote) and write up: - Standard algorithm questions and answers to quickly revise on - Soft questions (like name a time you rose to the challenge/etc) with pre-prepared answers. - ANY f*ckups from previous interviews and how to n…

Funny thing about the hiring sieve is just going through enough interviews prepares you at some point enough to pass somebody's hiring bar. So it's not that you were actually worthy of being hired, rather it's that you had studied for the test enough at that point.

The whole thing is mildly comical.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job while having a job?

#48

Post by james_s_tayler »

twoquestions wrote: post #16
jurassic wrote: post #13

It sounds like you are applying cold and going through the process used to filter the unwashed masses (e.g. new bootcamp grads, college grads, career changers with no network, fakers of all stripes). There are some diamonds in the rough there but it's no surprise they put that candidate population through the ringer to make sure they don't waste their engineering staff's time screening duds. If you've been working fo…

So it sounds like building your network is a more valuable thing to do than study for all-day interviews. However, why should some well-connected person want to talk to some bozo who's only giving them the time of day to job hunt? Especially in a career like ours that isn't dominated by talking like sales is?

I actually think our careers are dominated by talking. At least my experience is that talking is very, very important.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job while having a job?

#50

Post by paulie_a »

bootsz wrote: post #27
paulie_a wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is whiteboard interviews a sv thing? Because they seem to be rare in the Midwest? Maybe I've just been lucky. But they seem like an incredibly poor way to interview someone.

I'm in the northeast, and I've found them to be pretty common. But I've interviewed a few places that did not do them.

I will never conduct a white board style interview, and in the future while interviewing the company, never take one. That is an automatic pass. Hell I'd recommend hiring someone that simply said "no" to that style of interview
Post reply on HN