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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#431

Post by arp242 »

casenmgreen wrote: post #411

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…

This is absolutely a problem. Pretty much any position, including in-office, is swamped by people from far-away countries with no visa.

But I think that's probably a different problem. If we exclude the clueless applicants: the hiring pool is just so much larger. Back in the day you'd live in city X and you'd get get a job in city X, or maybe neighbouring city Y. The number of devs in that location was often in the thousands, or maybe even hundreds (depending on size of city X and Y, obviously).

But now it's everybody in the US, or everybody in the EU and Africa, or everybody in the world.

"Get the best applicant out of five qualified candidates" is one thing. "Get the best applicant out of five hundred qualified candidates" is quite another.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#432

Post by levlaz »

Peroni wrote: post #96
levlaz wrote: post #68

> manage yourself and manage your peers, but you also have an engineering manager and a project manager and the CEO is your skip-level manager and the CEO’s brother is also your skip-level manager too This is hilarious and I’m sad I’ve seen versions of this more than once. Overall I enjoyed most of this article but disagree about the objection to behavioral interviews. I think they’re an important part of the modern…

Behavioural interviews are extremely effective provided you do them properly. Running behavioural interviews properly is extremely difficult and takes legitimate skill and experience to orchestrate. It's not something you can pull off by simply following a few rote questions in an interview pack. As a result, most behavioural interviews are ineffective and absolutely riddled with bias.

Yes, I agree with you. I've seen this done well and I've seen it done horribly.

Do you think its better not to do them?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#433

Post by [deleted] »

evrimoztamur wrote: post #23

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…

[deleted]

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#434

Post by StefanBatory »

paxys wrote: post #205
kredd wrote: post #64

It really sucks right now, but recent grads and juniors are suffering the most right now, to my understanding. There's an over-production of CS grads, as the industry looked very lucrative, so a lot of people decided to go software engineering route. It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do…

Nowadays a lot of companies are hiring new grads through their internship pipeline only . So to be able to break into the industry you have to start looking for jobs in your ~sophomore year of college and hope to keep getting return offers.

Worse when you can't land anything for internship... :/

I'd be willing to work unpaid even

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#435

Post by craftkiller »

bedobi wrote: post #151
Peroni wrote: post #86

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…

except that referral hiring isn't a thing almost anywhere I know because I've referred people I KNOW are great SE's and I'm literally willing to vouch my own employment for, and they still get treated no different to any other candidate

The only time my referrals haven't been given immediate, obvious special treatment was when it was a referral at a large company, submitted directly to HR through some internal referral webpage. That basically guaranteed them an interview but otherwise didn't move them along. All of my other referrals have been made in-person directly to my manager (or someone up the org chart) and they have invariably been given an offer after an abbreviated interview process.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#436

Post by koliber »

The job market is weird. It seems there are more and more candidates on the market. However, whenever I recruit for senior roles, it seems the candidates are less and less skilled.

This is highly anecdotal. The job post is the same: sr. java developer. Everyone has 5+ years of experience.

I need someone who can:

- explain in depth how a HashMap works - verbally pseudocode a program that solves a problem, where an adequate solution involves loading a file into a HashMap> and then filtering the results.

This is not rocket science. It's not trivial, but anyone calling themself a senior programmer should be able to do this. Out of 135 candidates in my last round, 5 performed well on this interview, and 10 more did OK-ish.

It seems the candidates mostly have experience with loading data from one data source, doing some transformation with no regard for performance, calling APIs, and storing data into another data source. Using proper data structures or understanding the performance of an algorithm be damned.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#437

Post by kelseydh »

Peroni wrote: post #158
bedobi wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except that referral hiring isn't a thing almost anywhere I know because I've referred people I KNOW are great SE's and I'm literally willing to vouch my own employment for, and they still get treated no different to any other candidate

I'm not saying referral hiring is executed well. It's really poorly executed. When I look at the data of companies I've hired for and tracked the success rates of referral hires, they systematically perform better than average.

There can be an element of politics to rejecting a referral hire. Your coworker may not want you to be stacking the team with "your people". Petty and sad but it happens.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#438

Post by ajkjk »

ricardobayes wrote: post #311
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,…

Most mechanics I know have long forgotten how to "connect the dots" and troubleshoot issues. Everything became computerized there and all they do is plug in a code reader. They literally don't do that "could it be spark, could it be fuel" kind of thing anymore. Most branded garages follow company instructions, "IKEA"-style, aka use a 10 socket and use it here.

Could be! Doesn't mean those are the mechanics we want to be using though...

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#439

Post by thrwaway1985882 »

writeslowly wrote: post #49

This brought up a recent experience of my own with the tech interview process: I have to conduct a lot of coding interviews at my job (I personally think DS&A interviews are kind of stupid, but I get assigned to do them all the time anyway). I recently did one with a senior engineer who seemed like he was sort of blowing off the whole thing, and also forgot almost everything about the language we were running it in.…

Did he turn out to be a good hire? Or, if too early to say, does he look like he will be a good hire?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#440

Post by EchoReflection »

highly recommend the book "Ultralearning" by Scott Young to everyone, especially people looking for a new job/to change jobs (yes, I realize if one is looking for a job theoretically one "shouldn't" have time for "extra" reading). Truly an inspirational and empowering read.

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/ultralearnin...

https://www.audible.com/pd/Ultralearning-Audiobook/006294514...

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/summary-anal...

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