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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#601

Post by TechDebtDevin »

torlok wrote: post #268
irrational wrote: post #253

I read through this, but I still don't know how the company I work for fits into it. I am a programmer for a Fortune 100 company, but none of the stable company descriptions seem to match my company. Certainly not in terms of compensation. $5,000-$10,000 per day? By my calculation, I make about $800 per work day and don't have any stock options or that kind of stuff. So, the pay (apparently) isn't great, but it is st…

These numbers are absolutely insane. In Poland 300 EUR per day is a good senior level salary. If I earned 10k per day, I'd quit after a year, but a medium house, and live very comfortably just from a 2% interest rate for the rest of my life.

You're in Poland.. In California there are certainly (probably less than a few thousand) people making these rates. They've been there 20 years and are principals and above.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#602

Post by TechDebtDevin »

soloFeelings wrote: post #500

Is it a joke that some tech companies pay 10k a day? Do you have company examples?

He's referencing people with 20 years at a company or are extermely established in a nichr field that are Principals and above. Yes this exists. A distinguished at Google is taking home +2.5mm a year in comp

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#603

Post by TechDebtDevin »

bendigedig wrote: post #150

I think it might be time to consider diversifying our skills to cover non-tech areas of employment. I know I certainly am.

Someone very senior told me last year that it was about to be a period where the wheat from the chaff would be separated in engineering. He was spot on. Which will you be :)

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#604

Post by FpUser »

After I went on my own in 2000 I use one rule: only look for smaller privately owned companies whose core business is not software development and who need some software products to support their business. It takes some skill to find but then if you clicked with the owner you / your tiny company will be spared from usual bullshit like SCRUM, why don't you use this framework / language, what this esoteric language construct means etc. etc. The only thing you will have to prove is that you are successful in delivering products to owners. I already had the reputation when I went on my own and just kept accumulating happy clients and references.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#605

Post by Aurornis »

viridian wrote: post #387
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…

Are you paying me for that 4-5 hours of my time? If not, you'd better be a damn sight better in terms of what you offer as an employer, versus the rest of the market. I get that it's different for the unemployed, but we shouldn't let people do this to us if we are in a position to help it. I personally have only ever dropped a potential employer mid interview pipeline once, and it was when they sprung one of these on…

4-5 hours was for the whole process, recruiter call, screening call, time for questions from the candidate, negotiation, and others.

I was not suggesting every candidate gets a 4-5 screen at the start.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#606

Post by Aurornis »

not_wyoming wrote: post #171
mavamaarten wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood why people hate them so much. From the employer side of things it only makes sense to get a feeling for someone's abilities other than an impression based on words alone. You can't believe the amount of shit solutions we've gotten from candidates. We just let you make a very simple kata. A tiny program that generates some console output, you have to refactor it to make it prettier and you need t…

> From the employer side of things it only makes sense to get a feeling for someone's abilities other than an impression based on words alone. I'd like to believe this is true, but it fails to explain why candidates for other business functions don't receive the same scrutiny. I'm not aware of analogous evaluations to get hired to other business roles (e.g. marketer candidates aren't asked to demonstrate a working kn…

> I'd like to believe this is true, but it fails to explain why candidates for other business functions don't receive the same scrutiny.

I don’t know where this idea comes from. Other roles at most companies I’ve worked for have had plenty rigorous screenings for people, often including more reference checks, portfolio reviews, work samples, presentations, and other things.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#607

Post by lmm »

risenshinetech wrote: post #536
lmm wrote: post #512

Just like "if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid", if you were smart enough to see all the problems in all your past jobs but those companies still went bankrupt, maybe you weren't actually the ideal employee you think you are. And if programming interviews are beneath you and only passed by your inferiors but you can't pay rent, maybe they're not actually so far beneath you. Using your l33t knowledge of AWS t…

What a cute take. As if seeing the problems and being given the authority to solve them always came in pairs. My guess is you're one of the interviewers/employees he was talking about in the article.

> As if seeing the problems and being given the authority to solve them always came in pairs.

My point is that there's no value in seeing the problems if you can't or won't do anything about them. Like he seems to want to be congratulated/rewarded/hired for being able to blame other people for the failure of the places he previously worked at.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#608

Post by ajkjk »

dzonga wrote: post #571
ajkjk wrote: post #167

I enjoyed this, but I can offer an anecdotal correction: this person does not know what the Amazon bar raiser interviews are like (or at least, used to be like 10 years ago). They're not behavioral interviews. They're more like "lateral thinking" interviews, like: here's an abstract problem, what ways can you think of to tackle it? And then drilling into the details to see if you're just making up fluff or you can so…

the same amazon - that can't sync where the video last played ? up until those same companies start to make userland software that actually works. interviews are or will remain just a hazing ceremony.

Eh. What you're detecting is the quality of the (product) management, not the quality of the engineers. Although also my data is ten years out of date, and Amazon's quality varies vastly across teams and orgs.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#610

Post by tylerhou »

dakiol wrote: post #398
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,…

I think there’s another group: people who can come up with solid code by using search tools. I code, sure, but I will never come up with a custom solution for any non trivial problem. I know where to find appropriate solutions (the best ones) because I’m aware of what I don’t know (I read a lot of tech books). You cannot test this in the classic tech interview (because I would googling 75% of the time). The final res…

As the problems become harder, you can’t just Google for solutions. Really great engineers often build things that nobody has ever built before — or at least not documented how they built it publicly. If you don’t have fluency in the fundamentals, you won’t be able to piece together the parts that you need to build novel systems.

Second, part of hiring junior engineers is evaluating their growth prospects — e.g. new grads are often completely unproductive for up to a year, and firms make large investments when hiring them (maybe up to $200,000 in mentorship and wages). People with the attitude “I don’t need to learn/understand things, I can just Google them” are unlikely (IMO) to reach that level of seniority.

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