If you're an average developer, get a job at a boring company in the midwest. Companies that are massive and old and have been around since before computers existed.
Panic at the Job Market
641–650 of 1001 posts
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#642In 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?
I think the best insight you can get into a potential hire is by asking deep questions about their experience. This takes IMO a really smart interviewer. I try to think about their past projects as if I had to take them on myself and ask them questions based on what I’d expect to be the difficult parts of the implementation. Especially things that sound like data hot spots or might benefit from parallelization.
I’m actually most interested in finding out what abstractions they were able to apply, and not necessarily the end result but more their problem solving process, because I’m going to have to live with this person’s design choices.
In my experience the above is just really hard for someone to fake. If they try to steer me away from talking about their experience or gloss over too much then the BS alarms start to go off…
Really the above is also IMO the real value in asking folks to solve coding challenges. It’s not so I can see you struggle to write code on the spot. I want you to talk to me. I want to know how it’s going to feel to collaborate with you. Are you going to go off on your own and do a bunch of stupid garbage I’ll have to fix later? Or do you design in the open?
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#643I 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…
>Some days I’m pulling my hair out because someone who has been unemployed for months has valiantly refused yet another take home problem that could have moved their application forward with a minimal time investment.
How would you/candidate know in advance that the current take home problem will lead to a hire, if completed ?
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#644Earlier 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…
> when they describe the process it adds up to around 4-5 hours total 4-5 hours is pretty excessive for an interview process actually. A candidate cannot be doing 4-5 hours for an interview process just to hear a no at the end. Successful job hunts need to have many irons in the fire at once and if each one is taking 4-5 hours there's only so much you can realistically take on I know that interview processes generall…
Honestly, I will happily do a 4-5 hours interview but I will only do it once it's clear there's a 90% chance of a fit. In which case, I often actually enjoy it because it's a chance to get to know future coworkers and the working environment and just make sure I'm not jumping from a frying pan into a fire, etc.
But I also on the whole refuse interviews that are "leetcode" type situations and my nightmare would be 4-5 hours of some arrogant person 15 years younger than me trying to trip me up on "skill testing" trickery.
But sitting and talking for a few hours and meeting a bunch of people or analyzing a codebase together, or talking about a CS paper they've given me in advance to read? I think that's normal. But, again, that's only if we've done the first round or two and it's clear there's likely going to be some movement, and we're just doing our final due diligence to make sure both parties think it's a fit.
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#645My pessimistic take on the world at the moment is that at least 50% of jobs in the US fall into Graeber's BS jobs category. I saw a map a few years ago that labelled the largest employer in each state. In every state except Arkansas (Walmart), the largest employer was a university or a healthcare company. Education and healthcare policies are controversial because everyone wants those things to be as good as possible…
> "We already have UBI, it's just the overblown bureaucracies housed by American corporate structures."
Don't forget disability insurance, which is massively abused, functions like a UBI
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#646Earlier 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 love long takehomes. They're like pet projects, but with clearly defined goals and with people that might even give you a review if you're lucky. I always use them to try a new library or a framework, and often continue improving on them even after they're submitted and evaluated.
Troll!
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What? The problems described were created before he got to those places. And he did solve them.
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#648How do you know you're not the midwit? To me it seems quite reasonable that author is the one over complicating everything, and in reality coding interviews are just not that bad. [edit: they're not that bad in the sense that hiring is a inherently lossy process of projecting something incredibly complicated, like skills, personality, motivation, and situation into a 45 minute interview where only 1 or 2 dimension ca…
>How do you know you're not the midwit?
You don't, that the point.
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#649In 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.
How many of those are actually qualified though?
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#650Wild that explanations of the tech job market like this are still being written without referencing the tax consequences of Section 174 changes.
On the other hand, how would anyone have heard about this? This is the very first time I'm hearing anything about Section 174. Plus, this doesn't really explain Europe's tech sector dumping, since from a quick search this is entirely an American thing. So maybe you're just as wrong as anyone else?
Section 174 has been covered many times on this site.
It could explain part of Europe's dumping. If the hiring market in the US is weak, some of those displaced devs could work for European software businesses, at least on a contractor basis, because remote is a thing. I've done that. I'm not doing it now (I'm globally unemployed, ha) but I did do it in the past. Was quite nice actually, the European company I worked with actually paid almost immediately when invoiced, rather than than drag it out 30-60 days as is customary in the US.