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Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

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Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#521

Post by WalterBright »

bluGill wrote: post #517
WalterBright wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picking a career you're interested in and company you're interested in makes things a lot easier than having to maintain a phony facade. A word of caution - interviewers tend to interview people an order of magnitude or two more times than candidates do interviews. What this means is they learn to detect the bullshit. A friend of mine is in the recruiting business. He interviews candidates all day, and has for many y…

Maybe, but who dreams about envelopes? Yet society would fall apart without someone making them. The same can be said for the vast majority of things most companies make - it needs to be made, but it is in reality boring. All companies have interesting problems to solve along the way. But most have boring products. I can work for most companies because even though the product is boring I know I will find something in…

> who dreams about envelopes?

There are all kinds of people. That said, if envelopes isn't your bag, nobody is making you interview with them. Find something that does interest you. Me, I'd rather be a lion tamer than a tax accountant (yes, I have the hat), but the guy who does my tax accounting loves it.

> I know I will find something interesting.

And there you go.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#522

Post by verve_rat »

Spooky23 wrote: post #470
shoemakersteve wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this line of thinking incredibly bizarre. If PTO is important to the candidate, why should they waste their time spending hours interviewing only to find out that the work-life balance in this position isn't going to work for them? To you that's having their head up their ass ? God that's strange to me. I'm sure glad I don't work for people who make sweeping judgements like that.

You’re looking for a job. You have 10 minutes to ask questions that make you stand out, to a individual who probably cannot answer the question. You do you.

Employment is a partnership, not servitude. That means the employer needs to convince the employee to work for them. I'm fine being rejected by a place that will treat me like shit.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#523

Post by swader999 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #332
linuxhansl wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually I am more inclined to hire someone who discusses time off during an interview. It shows that they think about their life-work balance. I do not need heroes, I need reliable folks who do not burn themselves out. Or to put it in a cliche... I need people who work to live rather then live to work.

and also importantly people who have family to take care of. If someone comes to me and asks for time off because they have children or partners or parents to take care off and they take that seriously that certainly deserves some respect would make a better impression on me than someone showing up with a Patrick Bateman business card in hand

Nobody should have to even give a reason for a time off request if it's part of your work agreement.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#524

Post by colecut »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #446
ramraj07 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should all ask this question in our interviews so we can avoid these shitty teams that way!

Unfortunately, there are too many different ways to be shitty, so while it would filter out a few, a lot of shitty teams wouldn't be detected by that particular question.

So you're saying we need more questions

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#525

Post by skrtskrt »

xyzelement wrote: post #483
chown wrote: post #474

> No one is going to tell you in an interview that they are going to be unreliable, abusive, pompous, or never show up to meetings on time. People might claim they have “signals” for these things… I had a great interview with one of the FAANG companies. The technical interviews, 6 of them in a row!, felt more like they were wanting to see me fail spectacularly rather than focus on my approach of solving whiteboard pr…

>> I struggle with work-life-balance and working on it. If I can overcome that and learn how to take breaks timely I might be more productive.". .. HR didn't like it because it was not one of the canned responses she was expecting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Just curious, how do you know that (a) you failed in HR (b) that it was this question and (c) for this reason? I ask because it's unlikely that this was literally the feedback giv…

Yeah even if the person came to this answer of their own independent thought process, this answer to the weakness question either comes off as:

1. "I work too hard" which is one of those classic canned answers to avoid that makes you sound like a suckup

or

2. "I can't manage my time to the point where I am in danger of tanking my own productivity or burning out or both", which even if true (plenty of us suffer from this), it is obviously not a great answer to give in a hiring process.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#526

Post by swader999 »

bluGill wrote: post #502
skeeter2020 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the company thinks they have a good story around PTO they will sell it in the first interview. As an interviewee it's very important to me and I will definitely ask questions, but later in the process when I have more leverage. I don't think someone asking in the first interview is lazy, just perhaps naive. They'd be better to ask about work/life balance and expectations in general and then probe what the intervie…

At my company you get one interview, if you get a second interview it is because we liked you but someone else was better and passed your resume on to a different team. One thing we do is take every candidate to lunch (COVID has changed this of course) with someone who doesn't have input into if you are hired: so feel free to ask those questions that you are not sure about. Having done a few interviews, nobody knows…

I always leave time off conversations to the offer negotiation stage when I make it past the interview stage. I want my time off in writing and if it's not enough I'll ask for much more money before I accept.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#527

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #521
bluGill wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but who dreams about envelopes? Yet society would fall apart without someone making them. The same can be said for the vast majority of things most companies make - it needs to be made, but it is in reality boring. All companies have interesting problems to solve along the way. But most have boring products. I can work for most companies because even though the product is boring I know I will find something in…

> who dreams about envelopes? There are all kinds of people. That said, if envelopes isn't your bag, nobody is making you interview with them. Find something that does interest you. Me, I'd rather be a lion tamer than a tax accountant (yes, I have the hat), but the guy who does my tax accounting loves it. > I know I will find something interesting. And there you go.

[deleted]

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#528

Post by The_Colonel »

nickelpro wrote: post #290
petepete wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm about 1/1,000,000th a Fabrice Bellard, and I'm fine with that.

Bellard is who I reference in these situations also. He's a sort-of empirical refutation of the assertion "10x programmers don't exist". I always liked that he lists qemu and ffmpeg on his website as afterthoughts mixed in with all the other code he's written.

Bellard is obviously 10x (or 100x) engineer when you need to port Linux kernel to JavaScript or compute the longest Pi sequence.

But most jobs aren't like that and require a mixed skillset - problem solving, people skills, stress resistance etc. and it's entirely unclear how Bellard would fare there.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#529

Post by The_Colonel »

readams wrote: post #514
hatch_q wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author nails it though with: "We should be far more concerned with keeping 0.1x programmers off our teams than finding the mythical 10x programmer."

This is just rescaling. The author is actually acknowledging that there exists 10x differences but divides by 10 for some reason.

1x is supposed to be a baseline for an average productive programmer.

0.1 is someone who isn't actually a productive engineer but somehow faked the interview process.

It's not difficult to be 10 times more productive than somebody who isn't productive at all. I'm at least 100x better Kotlin developer than my 30 years dead grand-grand father who never saw computer IRL.

It's much more difficult to show that you can be 10 times more productive than the average productive developer.

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