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Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

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Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#461

Post by zeemonkee3 »

aluminussoma wrote: post #442
zeemonkee3 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to someone who has rent and loans to pay, medical needs or family to feed. Bootstrapping takes savings/investment and a LOT of time before you see a penny of profit.

I am totally empathetic to this. I did not intend for it to be a trite statement. I'm in the same boat. Not all ventures require lots of savings. (Time? Definitely). It is conceivably possible to try and bootstrap something outside of working hours. The original author was able to devote much time to GitHub projects, so it's not a stretch that the author might be able to bootstrap an idea.

Sorry, didn't want to come off too harsh. I've gone down the bootstrapping route before and it's very, very hit and miss. Actually mostly miss.

The skills required to build a product or service people will pay you a livable wage for are not the same as those needed to write an open-source library. I've seen people with terrible coding skills make successful products with a "Rails for Dummies" book on their lap as they go (they hired pros later to clean up the mess), and I've seen excellent coders flounder with terrible ideas and business execution.

Personally I'd love to jump off the hiring hamster wheel, but realistically - outside of consulting (which has its own share of nightmares) - I don't see that happening even if I do come up with the perfect idea in the shower tomorrow.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#462

Post by Apocryphon »

wdewind wrote: post #392
geebee wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't object to an employer wanting to see a background in data structures and algorithms, sql, binary, and a few branches of math. This is why I agree that hiring is broken but also understand that it isn't easy to fix. Some of it stems from something very wonderful about our profession - we are flexible about how people can acquire this background. In law, you must do a 3 year JD[1], and you must typically pay wa…

Interesting post, a lot I agree with, but I think if you aren't working on bridges or things that can kill people when they go wrong credentialing would probably be a negative.

Software is eating the world, right? There's already a lot of code that could kill people. Or work on bridges.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#463

Post by praneshp »

unprepare wrote: post #90
Scea91 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.

IT (By IT I'm talking about my industry, I'm an IT administrator, not programming) hiring is based a lot on certifications, certifications which are abundantly easy to scam. You can find full exams with answers of CCNA and every Microsoft cert imaginable, I've worked for companies that incentivise certifications, and i watched coworkers use these 'tools' en masse to gain easy pay bumps and pad their resumes. I've had…

Can someone explain why this is downvoted (it appears grey to me). Is his content wrong/false?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#464

Post by EdHominem »

falcolas wrote: post #181
Aissen wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not need to be in position of power to refer someone.

The usefulness of contacts only really matters when they are managing (or are a key-decider in) the team you wish to apply for. Otherwise, a reference will only add to the burden you have to overcome with the interviewers - they will consider not only your qualities, but the referrer's qualities as well. "Richard vouched for Jane? But Richard is writing testing software, and we're hiring for backend. We don't need a…

I've referred people senior to me and been told by the recruiter that it was significant.

Because I can't be expected to know their work as well as they do I describe their peers' opinions (well-respected in the NOC) and the soft-skills they have like mentoring, etc.

"Even though I was only an SDET, Dave took the time to help me fully understand the math involved in the problem domain and how to efficiently model it. This allowed for a 60% increase in my deliverables and put the entire team a week ahead of schedule."

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#465

Post by madelinecameron »

Xcelerate wrote: post #114

When I was an undergrad, my team won the Facebook Hackathon at our university in 2011, so they gave each of us job interviews. None of us got an offer, but the irony is that one of my other team members went on to work at Instagram, which was then acquired by Facebook less than a year later. I'm pretty sure that was about the most expensive way FB could have hired him. During my interview, the interviewer asked me wh…

I think anyone with a CS education can design something like that given enough time.

It isn't a question of whether you can do it, it is whether you can find a 'good enough' solution in an optimal amount of time. It is testing your creativity and problem-solving abilities.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#466

Post by Apocryphon »

eric_h wrote: post #285
ktRolster wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As she has been a plumber for years, so we recognised her skill Because being a programmer for years doesn't guarantee the person will have any skill. I met a programmer who had been working for 10 years, and couldn't write a program to swap two variables. I don't know why, but for some reason experience is not equal to skill in the programming industry.

It's really a question of what kind of experience you've got. Many programmers with "10 yrs of experience" really just have 10x1year of experience; they've just done the same thing over and over again for a decade without pushing out of their comfort zone.

Maybe more tech companies should start using some of their revenue and funding to invest in training for people with the will and potential to get past that first year of experience.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#467

Post by fjgla »

master_yoda_1 wrote: post #394

I don't have any problem with coding question as I enjoy doing that. But what piss me off is that going into google with referral is a piece of cake and even if I do good in interview I can't get an offer. I know couple of guys who don't even do coding and can't write a BSF but they get into google apple and facebook with referrer. This referrer sucks.

As far as I know referral is just a guarantee that you will be called back after they see your CV. It doesn't guarantee you getting hired. I've referred plenty of people and a lot of them never got hired or even failed the screening phone call.

It just means "hey, try out this guy" and they won't be throwing away your CV into the pile of hundreds of thousands of CVs they get every year. You still need to go through everything like everyone else.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#468

Post by raverbashing »

And of course we then will have to hear the sad stories of companies saying "they can't find talent"

And that's not even going into the salary/H1B issue, the problem is much deeper than that.

- I was an advocate at first, but take home exercises are pretty much useless. Because they at best won't fail you. And of course you could have written a new sorting algorithm that works on O(n) but what you'll get back is a complaint about coding style

- Having a github might be nice but as the article says it seems to be also in the category "won't fail you". It seems to barely matter

- And of course companies like Google ignore everything and make a test out of your interview, fail/pass grade, period.

People are probably missing an empathy component or working outside of the "SV tech clique" where if you don't code for 12h per day and doesn't know all libraries and algorithms by heart you're not even considered

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#469

Post by lj3 »

eric-hu wrote: post #240
swayvil wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing a lot of "reaching out" in this thread. Is this a new thing, like "passion"?

No, quite the opposite. It's an old trick for job searching. It doesn't originate in tech. It's one reason why people go to networking events in their industry. My impression of what reaching out means today is a chat over coffee, lunch, or less preferably a phone call.

What frequently gets looked over is who you're reaching out to. It doesn't do you any good to reach out to a rank and file developer. You need to reach out to (is seduce a better word?) somebody with hiring authority in order to bypass the ridiculousness.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#470

Post by Apocryphon »

pklausler wrote: post #390
swayvil wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing a lot of "reaching out" in this thread. Is this a new thing, like "passion"?

It's the latest euphemism for "communicating with a person in some manner whose details are not relevant" to join the already well-populated set { "approach", "contact", "consult", "get in touch", "speak with" }. I hate "reach out" with a passion and draw instant conclusions about those who use it, but I'm sure that most of the above were also hated when they were invented and it does fill a need for a missing verb i…

As buzzwordy as it is, "pinging someone" sounds even worse.
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