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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#771

Post by fullstackchris »

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,…

I find the second group more often than not so pendantically afraid of building something even a few lines of any sort of "anti pattern" that when they meet the messy qualities of reality they fail to build anything, or at least take 20x as long as the first group.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#772

Post by fullstackchris »

commandersaki wrote: post #733
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’ve been having quite a bit of luck at these coding assessments by simply memorising solutions to leetcode problems. This feels not very different to studying braindumps to get a vendor certification.

And this is exactly the problem. Being a software engineer is 1000 things more than just rote memorizing some toy problem that solves exactly 1 single toy use case.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#774

Post by asQuirreL »

The comments to this article are on the whole super depressing and haven't really matched my experience (again, on the whole), so I wanted to offer some dissenting opinions:

I don't think it's true that interviewers are in general incapable of identifying skills in others that they don't have. That would be like me being unable to acknowledge Da Vinci's genius because I can only draw stick figures.

A lot of these comments make interviews out to be a battle of wits where you are trying to best your interviewer: If you identify a gap in their knowledge, show them up (and that's what they are doing with their questions). My approach is that the interviewer is trying to find out what it would be like to have me as a colleague. Bringing up things because you think your colleague won't know them and then not explaining them is just obnoxious.

There are bad interviews where all these tropes play out. If you went in with a positive mindset and still left with a bad taste, then count yourself lucky because you don't want to work there.

But it feels like if you go in expecting an idiot interviewer who can't see your genius and, even worse, wants to show you how much cleverer they are than you, one way or another you won't have a good interview experience, and you'll be left convinced that the grapes are sour.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#775

Post by asQuirreL »

asQuirreL wrote: post #774

The comments to this article are on the whole super depressing and haven't really matched my experience (again, on the whole), so I wanted to offer some dissenting opinions: I don't think it's true that interviewers are in general incapable of identifying skills in others that they don't have. That would be like me being unable to acknowledge Da Vinci's genius because I can only draw stick figures. A lot of these com…

I also accept that when the job market tightens you are more likely to encounter worse interviews and worse interviewees because that is what is left in the pool.

The problem is when the market widens again and you look at every interview opportunity with jaded eyes and can't identify good from bad anymore.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#776

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

oblio wrote: post #770
moravak1984 wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I can't believe how much money I make for that little input, and whether that is ethical at all. This idea popped in my mind while on "home office" (sightseeing on the village with my wife) and saw the waitress panic because we paid her with a 500Kč for a 360Kč bill and she didn't know how much change to give... I got my answer right there.

That's a failure of society, not her fault. Subtraction is a skill chimps can master. The fact that she reached this stage means society failed her.

It indeed a failure of society, a sobering one at that.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#777

Post by [deleted] »

moravak1984 wrote: post #764
weatherlite wrote: post #701

Sometimes I feel really bummed out I am getting 1/2 (or less?) of Google compensation. But then I open my eyes - see the workers in my daughter's kindergarten slaving away taking care of 30 toddlers for less than half what I make, nurses and doctors working in conditions I wouldn't be able to tolerate for more than a few months without mentally collapsing, the people in the supermarkets, gas stations, police, fire de…

Sometimes I can't believe how much money I make for that little input, and whether that is ethical at all. This idea popped in my mind while on "home office" (sightseeing on the village with my wife) and saw the waitress panic because we paid her with a 500Kč for a 360Kč bill and she didn't know how much change to give... I got my answer right there.

[deleted]

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#779

Post by sph »

bmitc wrote: post #249
evrimoztamur wrote: post #23

I 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. 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…

> "what's your experience with C++ or advanced graph algorithms?"

I once got an interview to help fix an Elixir project. They were having issues with the Websocket module of Phoenix called Phoenix.Socket. It's a 1000-line long piece of code of a much larger framework.

The person that interviewed me brushed away the fact that I had worked 6+ years full time with Elixir, and had almost 20 years in this career, and just wanted to know, in three different ways, "what is your experience with Phoenix.Socket", "how many times have you used Phoenix.Socket?", "how many years would you say you'd used Phoenix.Socket for?". That literally was the only metric they used to determine how good a candidate was. Experience or knowledge doesn't matter, just how good you fill their ridiculous expectation.

It'd be like focusing on your experience with "iostream" in C++. Incidentally, only a bonafide liar will somehow tick all the boxes and stupid requirements.

This is the state of tech recruiting in the past 5 years. It is mind boggling.

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