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Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

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Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#411

Post by volkk »

eastbayjake wrote: post #382
laichzeit0 wrote: post #255

Don't people get job offers anymore from someone they used to know that moved to another company and then like "hey I know this really great guy who works at XYZ, we should definitely get him here"? That is literally how every job I've moved to happened, except for the very first one right after being a student. That's the only job I ever remember having to "interview" for. The rest were just through established soci…

You're way ahead of the game, OP. We talk a big talk in our industry about hackers and meritocracy, but this is still a relationships business -- like every other business. At most companies if you're cold-applying to a position on a job board, you're already behind your competition. I'd like to propose an alternative job hunt: (1) Start thinking about your next move before you need a job. (2) Send an email or DM to…

sounds great except now that person forwarded the resume, and you still have to do the exact rounds that you would have done when cold calling unless you're applying to a small shop

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#412

Post by tuukkah »

tylerhou wrote: post #391
aquateen wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how the sum would be unique to a particular combination of letters.

Works if you assign prime numbers to each letter and multiply instead. So a=2, b=3, etc.

To get decent anagram lengths and complexity, implement the numbers as a dict of repetitions of primes, and implement the multiplication by summing the repetitions. ;-)

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#413

Post by emodendroket »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #126

> 1. The job search takes much, much longer than it used to. Senior positions take longer than junior. There may be other factors in any individual case, but just as a general rule, the more experience you have, the longer it takes to get hired. This may relate to... > 9. Age discrimination really exists. In my experience, I haven't seen it. What I have seen is salary discrimination. I'm a pretty expensive guy. I've…

> Senior positions take longer than junior. There may be other factors in any individual case, but just as a general rule, the more experience you have, the longer it takes to get hired. This may relate to...

I recently read a thread on Reddit with people making the exact opposite complaint -- that senior developers just didn't understand how hard it is to find a junior position now.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#414

Post by blunte »

Once you get to the age where they will discriminate (40+, in general), you're probably better off running your own company or at least doing high value consulting. And by high value, I mean _value_ (could be money, could be freedom of schedule, technologies, etc.)

The last two corporate jobs I had, the companies found me. The few clients I've had as a consultant came to me. Being visible and having a little network is important, and of course having the current popular technologies is important.

But really, doing homework, doing dances, building PoCs, and all that other bullshit is... just bullshit. If a company is going to make you jump through tons of hoops or begin taking advantage of you before you've even gotten the job, they can just fuck off and hire the kind of person they deserve (who will probably fit better into their organization anyway!)

Keep in mind, even if the company has some really awesome people, you're still just useful while you fit. If their budget changes, or god forbid they're a public company and are beholden to the almighty quarterly earnings per share report, then you can be gone a week after you're hired with little more than a "oh we're really sorry". That last bit is one really awesome reason to work in countries that still have some sense of labor power. I think Germany is really good on this, but my experience in Netherlands was... profitable in that regard. Once you have a permanent contract, firing you typically means handing you enough cash to sustain you for many months. I'm not sure what the potential exit compensation is if you're fired due to poor performance, but if they're just downsizing you'll get a nice goodbye check.

The only way companies will ever change their behavior is if the workers stop bowing and begging. This is your life; and if you're truly investing your creativity and giving your all, it should only be for a company halfway worthy. Most companies are not, and you can tell from the interview process. Hell, if you look at enough job reqs you can start to tell just from the req.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#415

Post by emodendroket »

komali2 wrote: post #216

>Total Jobs Applied For: 82 >Total Jobs Where You Got an HR Interview 25 >Total Jobs Where You Got a Technical Interview: 15 >Total Jobs Where You Got an Onsite Interview: 2 >Total Job Offers: 1 From a recruitment standpoint, this guy's "sales funnel" is remarkably efficient. I'm more used to seeing a ration of 100 applications > 10-15 phone calls > 5 onsites/technicals > 1 offer. Needless to say he blew the initial…

I guess this is the benefit of using a recruiter... I don't think I applied to 10 jobs in my last search before finding one.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#416

Post by warrenm »

kearneyandy wrote: post #127

"I got all the way to the end, nailed everything perfectly and then never found out why I didn’t get it" "I saw this repeatedly on jobs that I got all the way to the end point on." "Total Jobs Where You Got an Onsite Interview: 2" Interesting points, although I would probably want to see more data before drawing the same conclusions.

You should never expect to find out why you didn't get hired somewhere. But the answer is always one of the following:

- someone else was a better fit (tech, culture, attitude, etc)

- you're actually truly incompetent

- the interviewers are morons

99% of the time, it's that someone else was a better fit.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#417

Post by amorphid »

taco_emoji wrote: post #390

> Number 6: Outsourced Hiring Assessment Services Are Very Much in Vogue I ran into this a few years ago. I bombed hard when they asked me some specific terminology question about the stages of the ASP.NET request lifecycle. I believe I just said "I have no idea" and the call was over shortly after that. It was frustrating--why are they hiring based on esoteric trivia instead of general programming skill? This assess…

I've done 99.999% of my development on a Mac. I took a coding quiz a few years ago that asked me where I could find the "ruby" executable on Windows.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#418

Post by warrenm »

kp1234321 wrote: post #87
ryanpcmcquen wrote: post #56

Number 7: Companies Really Want to Know Your Salary; Don’t tell Them So true. Do not tell them!

It's now illegal for companies to ask this in California.

It's not illegal to ask in most places ...but it's stupid to answer :)

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#419

Post by sankyo »

d1zzy wrote: post #260
yodsanklai wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently interviewed at a big tech company (phone interview). I spent quite some time practicing on leetcode (completed at least 150 problems). During the interview, it took me a few minutes of thinking before completing the assignments with what I think was the expected solution. We discussed the complexity and a few possible variations. The interview sounded satisfied and I really had the feeling that I had naile…

As someone that does lots of coding phone interviews I can say that yes, time is a factor. But it's relative, ie I'm comparing you to the time it took other candidates to solve the same problem. After all, we have to evaluate you, over the phone, in the course of less than an hour. If 2 candidates arrive to the optimal solution, the one that did it much faster is the better candidate. It sounds to me like you did pre…

> the one that did it much faster is the better candidate.

From my perspective that is only about 3% of what I expect from a software engineer. Writing readable, easy to maintain code that is well tested, collaborating with product and other developers for how a feature should work, influencing technical designs, giving good feedback are things I value much higher than how quickly someone can write a snippet of code that works.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#420

Post by emodendroket »

larrik wrote: post #30

I've been involved in hiring senior engineers for a while now, and here's a few counterpoints: 1) Ruby is hard to get a job in, so you are off to a rough start. 2) A lot of people with lots of experience actually can't code for crap. Do you know how many python developers I see that don't know the difference between a tuple and list? Like, how could you be a real dev if you never even wondered why sometimes you use […

Despite explicitly telling people I don't want to work in Ruby again I still get people e-mailing me about Ruby jobs. I think I need to switch places with somebody.
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