411–420 of 1001 posts
It's a bit like email spam - I remember back in about 2000 and something, before I sorted out my own email, getting literally ten thousand plus spam emails per day.
Imagine the same, but it's CVs, and somewhere in there might be a couple you care about.
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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…
I'm interested in learning more - in what scenario was topological sorting essential for generating plots, and what specific problem did it solve?
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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…
I will add my two cents for people who believe that this might be related only to the SWE and tangent industries: It's really not. I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from finance to fashion, or just trying to get promoted vertically (or horizontally), failing rather miserably. Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideratio…
> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. This is really key. I have applied for jobs before, and then get questions like: "what's your experience with C++ or advanced graph algorithms?". Only that, none of that shows up in my profile or resume. But they act surprised and completely shrug off how a decade of software and other relev…
From the conversations I've had it seems recruiters want someone who has an exact skill match for the job. They don't care what else you have done or how many years you have under your belt it's gotta be the exact list the employer wants.
I'm now optimising my resume (CV) for the job. I summarise the stuff that I think recruiters / employers don't care about.
The other thing I've noticed now is that when a recruiter reaches out quite often that role is not listed publicly anywhere. So your profile on the job systems - linkedin and elsewhere - better look real good or you won't get a call.
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> 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…
For over 10 years we've had people do a paid ~4 hr take-home which is very similar to the work they'll actually be doing (here's a dummy codebase, add a few features fix a few bugs). If they're not interested in getting paid to do that work now, it's a good signal for us that they won't be happy doing it when they're working with us. It's helped us find really wonderful people to work with.
I'm not happy working by myself on features/bugs in a codebase that no one will ever. It's meaningless work. If that's the job you're offering, then you're right, great signal.
But I imagine at your company that you work together on a codebase that people are using. That the requirements and bug reports are coming from actual users if not customers. If so, then you may be discarding some good talent who might be better for your company. The ones who will push back on bullshit work because they can see it's not doing anything for anyone.
Agree with a lot of this and have seen a lot of similar stuff as a former developer gone cloud infra guy for most of my career now. The core problem, as he gets to in a lot of this, is that if you work on infra, you are seen as a pure cost, and not adding anything to "revenue" or "product" (which is of course false). One of the most common patterns in hiring I see now is so exasperating it drives me to despair someti…
I've had that happen before. It seems like many hiring managers just look for those who check as many boxes on the application as possible, without regard for which of those skills are actually needed for the position.
I could be utterly wrong, but I suspect part of this is that applying for jobs has become so quick and easy - a button click - that entities advertising jobs are utterly swamped with utterly worthless applications. It's a bit like email spam - I remember back in about 2000 and something, before I sorted out my own email, getting literally ten thousand plus spam emails per day. Imagine the same, but it's CVs, and some…
> Now I’ve got nothing to show of my life of work, while other people who just picked a better company to work at 20 years ago and never left have been growing their wealth by a couple million dollars per year every year for almost their entire career, all working as just some rando middle manager at multi-trillion-dollar companies. The authors repeated insistence on incredibly inflated salary numbers makes me questi…
I don’t know, my former colleague joined Amazon back in 2014, just as I quit to start my own company. He became a solutions architect and got promoted multiple times and now makes close to $1 million a year, he’s not very technical and I’m not even sure what he does. But I’m sure it’s mostly bureaucratic.
Wild that explanations of the tech job market like this are still being written without referencing the tax consequences of Section 174 changes.
On the other hand, how would anyone have heard about this? This is the very first time I'm hearing anything about Section 174. Plus, this doesn't really explain Europe's tech sector dumping, since from a quick search this is entirely an American thing. So maybe you're just as wrong as anyone else?
I don't think 174 is the entire story -- I do think interest rates play a significant part, for one thing. But it's definitely part of the story, and definitely plays into some level of Europe's tech woes.