421–430 of 1001 posts
This structure is what most enterprise software teams have converged upon. If you're facing eviction, it might be wise to consider the upside of swallowing your pride and doing the job within the boundary conditions the market dictates. Do not let perfect be the enemy of good.
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. 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…
4-5 hours is pretty excessive for an interview process actually.
A candidate cannot be doing 4-5 hours for an interview process just to hear a no at the end. Successful job hunts need to have many irons in the fire at once and if each one is taking 4-5 hours there's only so much you can realistically take on
I know that interview processes generally aren't designed to make things easier on candidates but they probably should be if you want good candidates
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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…
I love long takehomes. They're like pet projects, but with clearly defined goals and with people that might even give you a review if you're lucky. I always use them to try a new library or a framework, and often continue improving on them even after they're submitted and evaluated.
Hiring people (mostly engineers) has been my full-time job now for about 15 years and I found myself emphatically agreeing with a lot of Matt's criticisms of modern hiring. Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration. Matt's…
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> 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…
In my country, last year it was definitely a candidate's market: I had recruiters reaching out all the time and I got the first job I applied for. This month I've been applying for jobs and not getting interviews. 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 th…
We hired on someone who had barely touched Swift as he'd been out of the iOS environment for many a year, and even before that had never done a ton of app development, but he had solid fundamentals in other languages so I went to bat for him and got him hired. Not even 4 months later he's a top contributor on our team.
"if you meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. if you meet assholes all day, you're the asshole."
Absolutely not true, it means you might e.g. be living in Berlin, or in Germany or Netherlands in general. Not everywhere people are nice and in some places they place a particular pride in being assholes.
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> 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…
Does that company hire or recruiter hire h1b? In order to get h1b approval, you have to make the case that "we interviewed x,000 people and we just can't find any qualified applicants! ". I'm starting to suspect that the industry has learned to set salaries low and churn enough applicants in order to reduce costs. One way to churn them is to do a phone screen and find a quick way to legally get rid of them. Then once…
1. Find H1B candidate you want to hire.
2. Write job requirements matching that candidate’s experience so well it’s very unlikely for anyone else to meet those requirements.
3. Advertise position to meet legal requirements and reject any candidates not exactly matching requirements.
4. Hire H1B candidate.
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…
Then I made a couple of obvious leaps and realised I was quickly converging on existing ideas like unions, and then guilds.
Does anyone know why guilds stopped being a thing? One possibility that comes to mind is that having a third party (the guild) involved in the employer/employee relationship would make things awkward and it might eventually seem unnecessary as the relationship developed -- although this would be a pretense obviously, as the employee is ultimately disposable as far as the company is concerned.
Obviously unions are popular, but they don't seem to go very far in terms of being involved in the whole process of work -- deciding who is going to work where, what the terms will be, etc.
>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…
From personal experience the coding round gets easier for senior/staff roles, even for the exact same question, because of the experience the interviewers have and the signal they are looking for (eg problem solving, communication, testing, etc.) At junior and "SDE II" level coding rounds are just toxic newly minted SDEs trying to make it a competition between the candidate and themselves ( I've got interviewers offe…
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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.