Panic at the Job Market • Hacker News Board

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#561

Post by turndown » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 11:55 PM UTC

Terr_ wrote: post #476

rafaelmn wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As in, a person who has used and learned a dozen plus languages but only tacitly used C++ suddenly will be a complete invalid when trying to write in C++? I've switched at least 5 languages professionally and used probably 5 more for extended periods of time and wrote a decent chunk of C++ "back in the day". I'd say C++ is the least suitable for "learn on the job" approach out of any language I can think of (I'm lu…

> I'd say C++ is the least suitable for "learn on the job" approach out of any language I can think of Anecdote: I've got a couple languages and decades under my belt, and a very simple C/C++ Arduino project is making me doubt my sanity. Ex: Serial.printf("%s", String("Hello world...")); // Emits 4 nonsense bytes... But shorter literals work fine. ________________________ EDIT: To save readers some time--I didn't int…

I imagine you got that code snippet(or a similar example) from somewhere but to me the fairly obvious problem is the chafing between the C and C++ world. %s is for C style strings and I have to imagine that printf function is in the C world. The String(“Hello world…”) is an object in C++ world so expect weird behavior when you try to combine them. As you say in your edit, SSO will make this even weirder.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#562

Post by lifeisstillgood » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 11:56 PM UTC

“”” don’t know about you, but I care about company structure, product issues, platform scalability and reliability, customer usability, developer usability, performance, legal compliance, security, corporate scalability, and team cohesion all at the same time. These are issues which don’t appear on your story point burndown boards because they are cross-functional improvements across multiple departments

“”” This struck a chord

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#563

Post by FireBeyond » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 11:56 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #294

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…

> 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…

> unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process.

"We don't want you to spend more than 3-4 hours on this", where "this" was:

Build a log parser for streaming Apache CLF. The parser should:

Keep a rolling monitor of the top 10 requests, displaying their velocity in req/sec as a rolling average.

Display aggregates of visitor counts over the last hour and day.

Have high watermark alerts when ingress traffic as a whole, or to hotspot URLs hit thresholds, and then be able to de-alert when traffic dropped.

Scaffolding to deploy same.

Unit tests and documentation for same.

Ability to ensure URLs were safe, stripped of any GET parameters.

> Often we’ll get people complaining about excessive interview loops, but when they describe the process it adds up to around 4-5 hours total.

One non-FAANG (not even close) well-known on HN's interview loop:

- recruiter screen - 30m

- hiring manager screen - 60m

- networking meeting - 30m

- resume deep dive - 60m

- peer interview - 45m

- cross-functional team collaboration interview - 60m

- leadership interview - 45m

- values interview - 30m

- department specific interview (picking on 'product') - 60m

- discuss take home writing project - 60m

- engineering collaboration - 30m

Things like that? Ridiculous. Oh, fun fact, they ask you to tell your references to expect a 30 minute call from them.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#564

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 11:56 PM UTC

daemonologist wrote: post #514

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had to design an error-message display for an office machine with an 8-line, 40-character wide LCD. Errors could only be shown on the bottom line and if they were more than 40 characters long (I'm looking at you, German language!), they had to scroll. I spent hours trying to figure out some mathematical calculation that took the screen width and the total length of the error message and how much was off screen…

I'm curious, what was the approach you tried in the morning? Maybe it's a failure of my imagination but I can't think of anything other than the "window" strategy except scrolling word-by-word or something.

It was long enough ago (around 1997 IIRC) that I don't recall the details. I think most of the problem was that I kept running into fencepost errors and finding edge cases around a string being exactly the same size as the window. One of my more embarrassing programming escapades that no one would have ever known about if I wasn't dumb enough to mention it online...

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#565

Post by xienze » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 11:57 PM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #556

Aurornis wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>but when they describe the process it adds up to around 4-5 hours total. 4-5 hours for an entry level role does seem excessive yes (if you're not a top tier tech company). How much do you really need to gleam from a new grad? Why does a new grad need to talk to the CTO to show their eagerness? I've gone through longer hurdles (one interview I did for a potential 2nd job with 2YOE at the time was HR call, 2 stages, a…

> 4-5 hours for an entry level role does seem excessive yes (if you're not a top tier tech company).

Not really? Between a half hour with the recruiter, an hour with the manager, an hour or 90 minutes with the broader team, a little time with HR, you’re bumping right up there on 4 hours. I agree with the parent, people’s expectations have been warped recently.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#566

Post by screye » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:07 AM UTC

lr4444lr wrote: post #549

caesil wrote: post #53

>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…

I wish on everyone complaining about tech interviews the misfortune of working with an incompetent fraud who makes their work life miserable. Jobs are on offer for 6 figure salaries that require nothing more metabolically taxing than typing on a keyboard, in a temperature controlled environment, where you get to use your brain to solve problems, and these complainers think it won't be rife with frauds? The whole boot…

FAANG-like companies don't usually interview bootcamp candidates. Most times, they're interviewing other ex-Fang-like or top university grads with a relevant CS degree.

Track record and conversational interviews are used for hiring lawyers, doctors, MBA and marketing professional.....why are programmers any different ?

Reality is, todays tech interview questions select for those without a life.

Great professionals solve hard problems. It drains you by night, leaving just enough time for some of workout, sleep, primary hobby, parenting and relationships. Even on a good week, you have to make compromises.

It's one thing to ask leetcode gotchas to fresh grads who've had 2 whole years to do leetcode. But conducting 10 rounds for a senior engineer with zero free time is torture.

Give take home projects. Do 2 hour long debugging sessions. Do system design. Just give me a work item. All good.

30 minute compile-or-die leetcode questions are not it. If you wanna test for IQ, make me rotate some shapes. None of this rote learned monkey business. It's not even that hard. But the prospect of giving up all my weekends for 3 months, just to get 12 days worth of time to be leetcode prim and proper..is untenable.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#567

Post by mr90210 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:09 AM UTC

ktzar wrote: post #551

I have been trying to hire someone with more than a couple years experience in frontend and event sourcing with any language in the backend for weeks and 90% of the applicants are just people right off a bootcamp where they just do Django. then a couple no-shows and people who essentially add any tech they've heard of in their CV. In the past I've interviewed dozens of people who mention five DBMS in their resume but…

How much are you paying? In other words: is your job attractive enough?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#568

Post by __loam » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:16 AM UTC

tstrimple wrote: post #537

__loam wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy is definitely giving delulu vibes but I think there's some truth to the idea that there are inequities in the market. People who work at FAANGs will often make more money and do less work than the foreign contractors in places like Poland and Ukraine getting paid $35k a year for the same work. It's worth talking about because I honestly don't understand why bay area engineers are paid 3 times as much as thei…

> People who work at FAANGs will often make more money and do less work than the foreign contractors in places like Poland and Ukraine getting paid $35k a year for the same work. The reality is, it's almost never the same work.

Not sure what this means. Obviously we're comparing apples and oranges between different projects, but it's weird to suggest that foreign contractors aren't doing the same work as domestic employees. I'm pretty sure FAANG does use foreign contractors too, so they are often doing literally the same work.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#569

Post by mr90210 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:17 AM UTC

7thpower wrote: post #487

theendisney wrote: post #484

You should start by treating a job search like a job. Get up at 8 and work 8 hours every day of the week. Lengthy interviews are great as you wont have to struggle figuring out what useful task to spend the hours on. You can also share your schedule in the interviews and disclose other interview processes in progress. They might find talking about interviewing more interesting than your interview. Working with them s…

This is what I am doing right now. I don’t want to risk part timing it, not finding something (been at this a whole week) and then wondering “what if I squandered my time?”. Sadly I’m forgoing working on my startup because I just enjoy it too much and won’t make progress on getting a role, but themes the brakes!

I am in the same boat. Btw, what are you working on?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#570

Post by ordu » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:19 AM UTC

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…

> its a test of EQ, if a simple question about past conflicts makes you this defensive then its exactly the type of thing it was meant to screen for.

You see, to do the behavioral interview properly the interviewer must have a psychological degree and a special training relating to these interviews. The hiring interview is a special situation for an interviewee, they act not like they do in a normal working circumstances. For example they tend to overthink questions, searching for the best answer that will be marked by the interviewer as a good answer. They incentivized to lie, because it is easy to find these questions in advance and to invent the best answers out, and no one ever will find out that it was a lie. So, the interviewer asked some questions and got some learned answers, how can they now interpret these answers and say something about the personality traits of the interviewee?

> I’d encourage OP to put some thought into this part for their own sake. You don’t need to make everyone feel better but if you show up with the attitude that you’re never wrong, then nobody will want to work with you. I know I don’t.

You advice is probably misplaced. The article is not a part of a job interview. So their EQ didn't show any failures, they wanted to rant and they had chosen the right place to do it. If he ranted at the interview, I'd agree that he needs to work on their EQ or self-control or something.

The comments here is full of diagnoses for the author, but I'm really reluctant to form any opinions about the author mind. It is just one article, that was probably written in a single take. What you see may be not the persistent personal traits, but situational and temporary state of mind. The article has a theme and the author provides examples to his points, and do you think he should provide examples against his points? Again: if they were writing a scientific paper, I would expect them to go through all the evidence, and to do it much more rigorous, but it is just the fucking blog post. Yes a long one, but still the blog post.

And on this basis I'd encourage the most commenters in the thread to work on their EQ. More specifically to read about Fundamental Attribution Error. People are largely driven by the situation they are in, but observers interpret behavior mainly in terms of enduring personal traits.