Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role • Hacker News Board

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#761

Post by StillBored » Sun, Apr 29, 2018, 12:41 AM UTC

Just to add to this a couple days late..

All this focus on coding in interviews is actually completely misplaced. Early in my career I had no problem writing anything you asked, but reading other people's code, and having a deep understanding was something completely different.

Now 25 years later, I can still code, and given greenfield development, or just larger pieces of work that by itself is somewhat isolated, I can make features appear in a shocking short time. Similarly debugging my own code, even once its reached into the hundreds of thousands of lines is usually better done by thinking about what in the code base would case the given behavior.

OTOH, the skill that really matters is the ability to debug problems in a code base written by a team I wasn't originally part of. That is still really hard, I'm fairly reasonable at it, but it probably takes me longer to understand someone else's code that it would have taken me to write it.

This also means my bug fixes tend to take a few days if the bug is in an unfamiliar piece of code. But, it also means that I can usually come up with a fairly trivial fix (frequently just a couple lines of code). Vs a lot of code reviews i've been on (which is similarly hard piece of software engineering) where there is a ton of noise and some 1/2 fix that fixes a particular case but fails to solve the general problem.

All that was a long winded way of saying that I suspect that software engineering is in levels, there is the first level where you learn to code, and there is the second level where you learn to understand all the different ways other people code, and then there is the third, where you can analyze the latter alongside a problem to determine not only does the solution solve the problem, but is it covering all the edge cases. A 10x programmer is frequently someone who avoids the second case, and fakes the third case by only reviewing code which touches subsystems they wrote. Interviewing solely for coding skills rather than coding skills + ones ability to read analyze other people's code is missing the most important and hardest part of quality software engineering.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#762

Post by magduf » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

scoggs wrote: post #759

magduf wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a senior engineer and have worked with recruiters many times before, and I've pretty much come to the conclusion that they're a big waste of time unless you want to do the 6-month contracting thing to avoid resume gaps or you just like moving around the country and renting rooms. I've tried working with them before, have gone on job interviews through them, and then generally found that the jobs that hire through…

It's not in their favor to find you an ideal, direct hire / non-contract gig. There is no chance for future money from a client if they find you your perfect fit / long term career type job. Not to mention most of the one's I worked with early in their career not only had no idea about any of the technologies they were checking to see if I was fluent in but they also acted like they DID know everything about programm…

I lived in northern NJ for a couple of years. You need to get out of that place; it's a terrible place for software engineers. The cost of living is ridiculous but the pay for engineers is mediocre at best. Move to Silicon Valley: the cost of living is only slightly more, but the pay is far higher, and the weather's a lot better too. And $35/hr 1099 is ridiculously low in that area, those are poverty wages.

Anyway, you make it sound like you can't get a job there without a recruiter. There's still plenty of companies hiring directly, I even interviewed at a few when I was there such as Alcatel at Bell Labs and some wifi company in Manhattan. My current gig is with a large company (in the DC area) that hired me directly. Stop wasting time with recruiters and just look for companies that do their own recruiting; there's no shortage out there that I've seen. I've had 8 jobs now that were not contracts and not through recruiters: 3 large corporations, 3 small companies, 1 mid-size, and one a state university research division. Am I apparently special that I'm able to find these jobs?

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#763

Post by warrenm » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

modbait wrote: post #611

warrenm wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should never expect to find out why you didn't get hired somewhere. But the answer is always one of the following: - someone else was a better fit (tech, culture, attitude, etc) - you're actually truly incompetent - the interviewers are morons 99% of the time, it's that someone else was a better fit.

Unless you're astoundingly good, if companies are interviewing around N candidates for each position, you should expect a hit rate of around 1/N. Doing significantly better pretty much requires all three of those to be simultaneously false.

Indeed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16916575

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#764

Post by warrenm » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 4:32 PM UTC

ljw1001 wrote: post #541

warrenm wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every company believes they are snowflakes. And yet...on average, companies are "average"

If only. Many companies hiring this way are Paul Graham's "mosquitos" whose role in the tech ecosystem is to have a one in 10 (or 100) chance of making it big, and are largely running on a cocktail of delusions and hype.

They may be trying to be those "mosquitos" ... but they're still - on average - "average"

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#765

Post by raarts » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

alacombe wrote: post #586

raarts wrote: post #319

> Coding Tests Can Trip Up Even Good Engineers I recently took the first one ever in my career (in my late fifties). People tell me they think I'm an excellent programmer, but I did awfully bad. Why? - it was my first time - in daily life I switch between many languages, devops, meetings, and research. It always takes me some time to ramp up, especially on syntax: coming from Elixir, switching to Javascript: how does…

Welcome to the club...

Also, I never heard from them again.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#766

Post by quickthrower2 » Tue, May 01, 2018, 4:37 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #438

nugator wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it necessary to know on the top of your head without Googling what a binary tree is for the position the candidate applied for? I've been a developer for 12 years and I've never had the use for that. Computer science is a VERY large field and being good at everything is impossible. Asking the right questions at interviews are crucial for finding the right people. If a candidate for a programming job knows binary…

I've been a developer for 30 years, and I haven't ever had a need for it, either - but I still know what one is. I expect that you do, too.

It's a nice way to filter out people who can code and basically do the job, but didn't have the financial resources to get a CS education, and weren't lucky enough when researching to see that his is an interview question. Although at least they'll know for next time.