Panic at the Job Market • Hacker News Board

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#581

Post by avelis » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:41 AM UTC

Tao3300 wrote: post #559

wnolens wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped at (paraphrased): "I've never passed a coding interview. Coding interviews hire the wrong people!"

He's not wrong. 90% of coding interviews are completely unrelated to the job. Here are some experiments for you to try in your next one: - if it's a super difficult problem, remark how fascinating it is and ask the interviewer how often they're doing this stuff - if it's FizzBuzz or something else that is solved and has a known value, propose hardcoding the answer as a constant and printing it without doing any compu…

"how would you make StoreJogger?"

That is a systems design question and would have been reserved for Senior/Staff+ level hires. I have learned there is a whole delivery framework for providing that answer and I would not ask that of entry-level engineering. Assuming it was entry level.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#582

Post by QuercusMax » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:42 AM UTC

hadlock wrote: post #504

paxys wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish high schools taught this more. If you do 3 internships in college, you'll likely (if you didn't sleep through them) have at least 1, if not 2 job offers when you graduate. Plus some actual job references, and three years of "work experience". Don't sleep on internships

I graduated with a BS+MS in '04, and my school (Kent State) had basically no CS internship program when I was there. There was something like 1 internship opportunity per summer for the entire department, which is just absurd. I lucked into a few campus jobs even as I was in high school where I got to do some real sysadmin / webmaster work along with some custom web dev stuff that gave me the chance to actually collect some requirements and build real systems for users, and see what their problems were. I'm sure I'd cringe to see the ecommerce site I built back in 1999 for a friend of the family!

Had I not had these opportunities, with no internship I probably would have been in much worse shape going into the job market 20 years ago. Today I can't even comprehend how screwed a newgrad with zero experience outside the classroom might be.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#583

Post by bmitc » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:43 AM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #538

bmitc wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I found a job as a developer after about 10 months of applying for 100 jobs per month. It was very weird this time round. Especially weird considering that my resume is exceptional (lots of experience; corporate, startup, back end, front end, full stack, distributed systems, open source). The list of technologies that I'm competent with is long and, for most of them, I've got open source projects to prove my claims.…

> This time round, employers had all kinds of weird esoteric requirements which made no sense.

I have often seen some jobs that sounded like a directory level manager mixed with principal engineer mixed with principal scientist all into one job with the title "senior engineer". It's just bewildering who these people are that they're looking for with such requirements that aren't even in the "nice to have" category.

> It all seems kind of conspiratorial if you ask me.

I agree that something seems very, very strange in this market in the past year or two. What it is, I don't know, but there is so much that doesn't make sense. It really makes me question if anyone really knows what's going on, in the sense that there are just a ton of companies out there that are near incompetent. Whatever is causing it, I think it's actually very bad for the U.S. economy. It seems like no one wants to do anything that's off the so-called rails. No risk. Do whatever everyone else is doing. Only find people who have no want to do anything except what you're already doing.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#584

Post by wwweston » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:44 AM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #425

melbourne_mat wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've helped hire three different developers where I work now, and been a part of countless interviews. I've found it much more beneficial to look for people who think like programmers than know any given language. Unless you're talking really specific, deep stuff in a given language, the syntax and whatnot are trainable. What you can't really train people to do is take a large task that we want our software to accomp…

Spot on. Even too many developers think that their main skill is recall of language/platform/tool specific niche arcana, and while it's true that sometimes having that will reduce friction, it's rarely what actually drives things forward.

Arcana are concrete and relatively easy to test for, though, so my theory is that it's a bit like the story of looking for the keys by the lamppost because that's where the light is, even if you dropped them somewhere else.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#585

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:47 AM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #190

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…

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,…

[deleted]

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#586

Post by lawgimenez » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:52 AM UTC

geraldwhen wrote: post #178

scottLobster wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's coding interviews and coding interviews. Asking basic questions that will be directly applicable to the job? Sure Filtering for basic knowledge to make sure the candidate isn't lying about their experience? Sure. Examining my thought process and producing working code is a nice-to-have? Sure. Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come u…

I run coding interviews. I would never give an esoteric algorithms question, or even really an algorithms question. I have prompts that test very basic concepts and nearly everyone fails. Resume fraud is rampant.

Codebase fraud is rampant too.

The company has very excellent coding and test interviews but the codebase is just shit.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#587

Post by tabigarasu » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:52 AM UTC

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…

Any advice for juniors in this market? I'm seriously considering saying "YOLO" and going solo. Sounds like a stupid risky idea but I've always kinda wanted to do this anyway and the job hunt is driving me insane. Selling myself to humans almost sounds easier than trying to get my resume through a dozen AI filters with 10000 other applicants

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#588

Post by farhanhubble » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:52 AM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #477

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…

I entered the workforce 25 years ago and interviews were less than an hour many times hired by the time you made it home. Somewhere in the last 5 years someone thought I don't want to be on the hook for a bad hire and I will not get in trouble for not hiring so unless someone else recommended a person don't hire until it's not your decision. Get as many people in the loop as possible and make sure they meet with ever…

You're almost right, but firing a bad hire in many places is near impossible.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#589

Post by camdenreslink » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:52 AM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #563

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…

> 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 ho…

I’m pretty sure I did that exact take home project. It was interesting and I felt I did a good job, but it was excessive. I really wanted the job though (rejected due to getting vetoed on the last interview I think).

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#590

Post by Jupe » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 12:54 AM UTC

From the first graph... Isn't this also the effect of software development no longer being depreciable? (If I recall, that was about the end of 2021 or so?)