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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#401

Post by charlescurt123 »

geraldwhen wrote: post #178
scottLobster wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's coding interviews and coding interviews. Asking basic questions that will be directly applicable to the job? Sure Filtering for basic knowledge to make sure the candidate isn't lying about their experience? Sure. Examining my thought process and producing working code is a nice-to-have? Sure. Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come u…

I run coding interviews. I would never give an esoteric algorithms question, or even really an algorithms question. I have prompts that test very basic concepts and nearly everyone fails. Resume fraud is rampant.

So I feel I strongly fall in a poor performer interview category any time any code problems come up. How would I convince you I do not have a fraudulent resume?

I study hours every day for many years now. I know many complex systems however studying algorithms bore me to tears.

I've built HPC clusters, k8s clusters, Custom DL method, custom high performance file system, low level complex image analysis algorithms, firmware, UIs, custom OS work.

I've done a lot of stuff because I can't help wanting to learn it. But I fail even basic leetcode questions.

Am I a bad engineer?

There seems to be no way for me to show my abilities to companies other than passing a leetcode but at the same time stopping learning DL methods to learn leetcode feels painful. I only want to learn the systems that create the most value for a company.

I imagine if you interviewed me you would think I wrote a fraudulent resume. Not sure how I am supposed to convince someone otherwise though. Perhaps I've been dumb in not working on code that can be seen outside of a company.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#402

Post by arccy »

bmitc wrote: post #303
klyrs wrote: 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.

or they wouldn't know if your answers could even be trusted, they need to be able to validate your answers.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#403

Post by jroseattle »

geraldwhen wrote: post #178
scottLobster wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's coding interviews and coding interviews. Asking basic questions that will be directly applicable to the job? Sure Filtering for basic knowledge to make sure the candidate isn't lying about their experience? Sure. Examining my thought process and producing working code is a nice-to-have? Sure. Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come u…

I run coding interviews. I would never give an esoteric algorithms question, or even really an algorithms question. I have prompts that test very basic concepts and nearly everyone fails. Resume fraud is rampant.

> Resume fraud is rampant.

So is interview fraud. The remote-interviewee-answers-questions-while-her-face-reflects-windows-popping-up-on-her-screen is tiring at this point. So, I decided to find a way to inform me if someone was being fed answers in a tech interview.

Behold, the low-tech whiteboard. Also known as a piece of paper and a pencil. With the candidates I've run into that do not pass the "smell" test -- where I think they are being fed answers -- I ask them to draw some things, on paper. It's not a true validation, but it gives me something of a clue.

I ask for a simple diagram. Different services in a network, for example. Or a mini-architecture. For their level, I'll ask for something that should be drop-dead easy.

I ask them to show me their drawing.

The responses I've received run the gamut of "I don't know" (after 5 seconds of deliberation) to "I don't understand the purpose" (after 5 minutes of silence) to "I need to shut off my screen for a while" (while refusing to explain why) to "it depends if your cloud is AWS" (not in any way remotely related to the question.) I did have a candidate follow-up with a series of questions about the drawing, which were feasibly legitimate.

This hand-written diagram is not an absolute filter (I've only used it maybe four times), but rather it can confirm some suspicions. I think I can generally gauge honesty from questions/tasks like this. And that's really what I'm after -- are you being honest with me?

It's imperfect, but it has been helpful.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#404

Post by electromech »

funemployd wrote: post #339
fallinditch wrote: post #279

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 n…

> we need to outlaw...

which is the process by which big entrenched players make it hard for others to compete with them. Consider this quote:

"I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators."

That's not a quote from Bernie Sanders; that's a quote from Mark Zuckerberg.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but my default assumption is that anything coming out of the political machine will benefit the big entrenched players at others' expense.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#405

Post by PheonixPharts »

scottLobster wrote: post #127
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…

There's coding interviews and coding interviews. Asking basic questions that will be directly applicable to the job? Sure Filtering for basic knowledge to make sure the candidate isn't lying about their experience? Sure. Examining my thought process and producing working code is a nice-to-have? Sure. Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come u…

> Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day

I'm always surprised how useless something is when I don't know it, and suddenly once I do know it, I solve lots of problems with it!

I've heard programmers grumble about how useless calculus is, before I learned calc I used to grumble about that too. After I learned it there were countless problems I unlocked solutions for by applying the thinking I learned in calculus.

I've heard programmers say that you'll never need to implement your own sort for mundane tasks, but, it turns out that after really grokking topological sort I used it countless times for fairly mundane problems like creating plots.

I've heard programmers say that learning the lambda calculus is a waste of time, and nobody uses functional programming. Yet it was people that understood these things that transformed Javascript from a useless browser oddity into one of the most widely used languages. It was seeing that Javascript was essentially a Scheme that unlocked it's true potential.

Over my career it's remarkable how many "esoteric problems" have lead to me solving hard tasks or even shipping entirely new products. If you're only focused on what is required of your day job today you're only going to be at best a mediocre engineer.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#406

Post by ajkjk »

granularity wrote: post #293
ajkjk wrote: post #167

I enjoyed this, but I can offer an anecdotal correction: this person does not know what the Amazon bar raiser interviews are like (or at least, used to be like 10 years ago). They're not behavioral interviews. They're more like "lateral thinking" interviews, like: here's an abstract problem, what ways can you think of to tackle it? And then drilling into the details to see if you're just making up fluff or you can so…

Are the scare quotes around wisdom because you're embarrassed to admit that such a thing exists? ;) Since it seems you've thought about it a bit, I'm interested to hear your definition of what is / isn't wisdom in an engineering context.

I was trying to mark the word wisdom as a designated 'term' instead of just the colloquial word. Sorta like how people sometimes write "$wisdom". I suppose single quotes would have worked better. I've never quite internalized the fact that some people parse double quotes as scare quotes, even though I've gotten that feedback from a couple people before...

I think of intelligence as all the stuff that is easy to say if it's 'right' or not, such as picking up knowledge, producing features, etc. Whereas wisdom is all the stuff that is harder to point at but is nevertheless valuable: making good decisions, intervening in things when it matters, fighting for things that are important, picking the better of two strategies without knowing the right answer, not getting bogged down in details, etc...

People who are intelligent but not as wise will do lots of "good" work but things will get worse over time. (Picture: large quantities of code that get things done but are a slog to read; giant architectures that feel work but feel unnecessarily complicated) People who are wise but not as intelligent will make things better over time, but make mistakes or be slow or struggle or be sloppy (Picture: small surgical changes that make everyone's lives better; making types of bugs impossible.) They also complain a lot if they feel disempowered to fix things. People who are intelligent and wise (and, I suppose, motivated) are the 10x engineers, the people that make something "amazing" instead of "fine".

Wisdom largely seems to require a combination of: (a) experience, so your intuitions are good, (b) confidence, such that you trust and give weight to your intuitions instead of doing what you're told, and (b) conviction, such that you care about doing a good job and will change things in order to do a better job, rather than trying to conform to norms around you.

It is very hard to apply wisdom to work if you can't see a reward that would come from caring more---it requires either a personal satisfaction from doing good work or a social reward from the people around you or some sort of long-term career benefits. Most places seem to go out of their way to avoid anything like those.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#407

Post by PheonixPharts »

trogdor wrote: post #228
morgante wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absurd. He has no concept of market rates (and frankly I'm unsurprised that he's not getting hired if his expectations are this out of whack). His resume even confirms this[0], because he seemingly thinks the appropriate level at FAANG would be L10 which is extremely rare . There is a 0% chance that his experience would level him that high. The entire article can be chocked up to a massively inflated sense of en…

Oh. My. God. His resume starts with a quote of himself stating that he has “seen things you people wouldn't believe.” It goes on to highlight that he purchased a domain name in 1997. He claims to have developed “the highest performing in-memory database in the world” but complains that “nobody really wants to buy it when free worse performing choies [sic] exist.” The part about nobody wanting to buy his product is in…

> a quote of himself

Curious, did you seriously not recognize that this is a famous quote from the final scene in Blader Runner?

I read that more as quirky call out to a famous film, not that he was claiming this was his own view of the world.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#408

Post by arp242 »

mavamaarten wrote: post #126
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…

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…

What you're doing sounds fine. We did something similar, and what we got back was either 1) the obviously correct solution, 2) try-and-error soup, or 3) extremely complex over-engineered junk (we specifically told people not to do this, so double fail).

What most people object to is stuff that's just really time-consuming to do well. And/or stuff that gets rejected for silly reasons (typically requirements that weren't actually stated).

Or things like "please implement Conway's game of life in 30 minutes. START NOW".

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#409

Post by ajkjk »

dakiol wrote: post #398
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 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 res…

yeah, that's wrong. I don't only want good code. I want a smart person who can write code and also do a bunch of other things, like make good decisions about code and mentor other people to write good code and fix problems before they happen and keep everything maintainable and clean. How you come up with your code per se is secondary, yes, but I'm testing for a bunch of other things that are not secondary as well.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#410

Post by fakedang »

notaustinpowers wrote: post #347
Aurornis wrote: post #294

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 remember I once applied for a job that was entry level mortgage customer service or something like that, paying just $45k/yr, can't remember exactly. I had to go through 5 interviews over the course of 4 weeks, with the final interview being with the VP of Marketing. Got the job offer, was waiting for the paperwork, and was called the next day that they are actually going on a hiring freeze and cannot hire me. It w…

Tech companies inflate roles, especially in sales teams, so that enterprises think they're talking to someone important, when in reality it's just a dude with his second job out of college. Same with Investment Banking Vice Presidents (although IB VPs will definitely have the experience to back it up, if not the authority in a deal).
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