Panic at the Job Market • Hacker News Board

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#631

Post by darby_nine » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:22 AM UTC

salty_biscuits wrote: post #483

klyrs wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a literal graph theorist, I cannot tell you how frustrating it is that (a) nobody seems to understand my work except (b) interviewers use it as a shibboleth to exclude people from jobs that will never need high performance graph algorithms. That, I never get called for these interviews because I don't use react angles or something, but if they did, I'd crush the interview and fall asleep at my desk once they start…

It is fun if you ever find yourself in this situation because you can play the uno reverse card on the interviewer and ask to clarify with impenetrable jargon and look for rising panic (can I assume the graph contains a Hamiltonian circuit? etc, etc)

Sadly people with power are immune to shame.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#632

Post by dennis_jeeves2 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:24 AM UTC

Quote of the week from the link:

>We find the midwit problem in job interviews all the time where interviewers think they are “elite special evaluators” needing to gatekeep the unwashed hoards of desperate candidates, but interviewers often can’t reliably judge or measure people who have better answers than they expect.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#633

Post by irskep » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:26 AM UTC

I really appreciate that in their big list of problems they've seen, they also discuss the solutions in detail instead of just dunking on these places.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#634

Post by Aurornis » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:27 AM UTC

bedobi wrote: post #151

Peroni wrote: post #86

Hiring people (mostly engineers) has been my full-time job now for about 15 years and I found myself emphatically agreeing with a lot of Matt's criticisms of modern hiring. Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration. Matt's…

except that referral hiring isn't a thing almost anywhere I know because I've referred people I KNOW are great SE's and I'm literally willing to vouch my own employment for, and they still get treated no different to any other candidate

I remember the first time I worked at a company that did referral hiring that skipped the interview process.

The first few hires were amazing. Everyone thought we had struck gold: Just find people your employees can vouch for, and hire them! Why didn't anyone else think of this?

Then we got a referral hire who turned out to be rather bad at everything, from coding to getting along with people. And another who was really entry-level, but their friend had referred them as being much more competent. Then we started screening more, and caught a referral candidate who barely knew anything about the things their friend had vouched for them having had done.

So we went back to using referrals as an additional signal, but they still had to go through the interview process.

That's the problem: Some people will only refer truly excellent candidates. Other people will just refer their friends regardless of their skills.

It very quickly becomes a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back" networking game, where people refer all of their friends with hopes that those friends will return the favor in the future.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#635

Post by darby_nine » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:31 AM UTC

twodave wrote: post #624

In my area at least, hiring isn’t slowing so much, but the quality of the average candidate has cratered in the last 5-10 years. My opinion personally on this is that if you can’t find a job building software, you are suffering from some combination of these factors: * Titles be damned, you aren’t actually a very talented engineer. Maybe this isn’t the right job for you. * You’re coming off as a jerk. Ask your friend…

What signals do you look for in a quality hire?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#636

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:32 AM UTC

rafaelmn wrote: post #301

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…

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#637

Post by darby_nine » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:32 AM UTC

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…

Coding interviews were never bad. Asking candidates to pull a red black tree out of their ass was always bad interviewing (unless you were hiring for this of course).

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#638

Post by zifpanachr23 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:34 AM UTC

ro_bit wrote: post #163

> Now I’ve got nothing to show of my life of work, while other people who just picked a better company to work at 20 years ago and never left have been growing their wealth by a couple million dollars per year every year for almost their entire career, all working as just some rando middle manager at multi-trillion-dollar companies. The authors repeated insistence on incredibly inflated salary numbers makes me questi…

You aren't on the outside of a joke you just don't live in the same bubble they live in.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#639

Post by darby_nine » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:34 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.

You see this sort of interview incompetence at every large company. There's simply no way to force software engineers to be fungible, but that's what the processes of many large companies expect.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#640

Post by zifpanachr23 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:35 AM UTC

486sx33 wrote: post #507

In a market with a population of 150k. I ran a job ad and got 292 applicants in under 24 hrs 2 years ago, I’d be lucky to get 8 applicants in a week, with probably 4-6 of those living in India or Pakistan with no way to North America So it’s an absolutely exponential job market crash. Most are sitting tight currently, no one wants to play musical chairs and be left standing.

Just accepted a new job offer wish me luck I hope I don't regret it.