All I could really gather from reading this article is that the author would likely be a terrible hire.
Panic at the Job Market
871–880 of 1001 posts
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#872Earlier 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.
I agree that Resume fraud is rampant. Simple questions that should be easy for “20 years of experience doing that thing” get bad answers >50% of the time
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#873[deleted]
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#874Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Employment vibes"?! "The entire industry was sleeping on SSL and DHE ciphers..."?! And that self-quote at the top, wow. No names of the companies he worked for. It's hard to take this seriously. Over 15 years of experience each in Erlang, Smalltalk, Scheme, Objective C, regular C, Python, JS, and then 9 years of Swift. Seems... impossible. I'd be willing to believe C + Python + JS + one or two others, since that mix…
> Things like Erlang + C seem unlikely; their whole purposes are different. Erlang and C are complimentary. Erlang calls code written in NIFs, coordinates C Nodes, and/or programs talking to the emulator over ports. The original design goal of Erlang was to make it easy to write correct, concurrent, fault-tolerant supervisors and coordinators for complex, high-performance systems. (Like suchas telecom switches.) Erla…
Thanks for the explanation! I knew it focused on concurrency, but just assumed Erlang was another functional language. Your description makes me curious about it. Also makes me wonder how useful it would be as a systemd sort of thing, given your description as "supervisor and coordinator".
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#875Classic HN material that I wouldn't find anywhere else, thanks for sharing.
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#876Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Xoogler, I have to say Google isn’t what it once was. You pay for your high salary with the fact that the one thing you can be sure most people you work with care about is how much money they extract out of Google and how they could get more. Taking care of toddlers is ostensibly a better use of the one life you get.
You know that feeling you get when you see a screaming toddler board a plane? Now imagine that's your work, times a dozen, eight hours a day, every day.
No that's not what its like. Thats maybe the first week on introducing the kids to the new caregiving situation. Once thats cleared its a lot more manageable.
I'm not saying its easy I'm just saying it isn't what you described.
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#877I 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…
I don't know what exactly kagi universal summarizer use but it didn't get tricked output: "The document discusses the current state of the tech job market, which has been impacted by rising interest rates. It explains how different types of tech companies, from speculative startups to stable enterprises, are affected by these economic changes. The author criticizes the ineffective and demoralizing nature of modern te…
Sounds about right
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#878Sometimes 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…
We have to complain about literally everything you just said. The entire system is broken. Everyone should be entitled to live their lives without being subject to these awful conditions, but we as a society keep allowing this to happen because we don't really see them as equals. As long as we individually can get by, we can easily dismiss what everyone else endures. I would happily live with less if everyone else co…
I think a lot of the problem comes from the phrase - 'comparison is the thief of joy'. Many people would be much happier with life if they weren't barraged by other hypothetical lifestyles and constantly comparing themselves to their neighbors. That's nothing new but much more amplified in the current environment.
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#879Earlier quoted context omitted.
So much this. My dad was a school caretaker, recently retired. He said how relieved he is because the work was grinding him down so much. My partner is a nurse and actually dreads going to work on a regular basis. I never dread going to work. Far from grinding me down I feel like I'm growing. I would honestly still do it even if I didn't need the money. My job gives me an outlet for something I really enjoy. A way I…
> you can't take anything away and they don't want to go backwards. I'm considering switching occupations and becoming a registered nurse (in my country in europe). The demographics here are so bad, I don't think we will need a large STEM workfore in ~15 years. Your shiny Vision-GPT model is useless when there is no one that wipes the asses of the elderly. And I don't think Silicon Valley has the capabilities to solv…
Nurse is one of those occupations with pretty much guaranteed employment unless you burn yourself out (which is a real possibility unfortunately), but as long as you are able to and want to work there will be plenty of work for the reasons you've just said.
If/when humanoid robots are a thing (probably not this decade or the next) then yeah we can all pretty much retire, but nurses will be the last to go.
Re: Panic at the Job Market
#880Earlier 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)
Reminds me of the time an interviewer tried to get me to walk through an efficient solution to elevators, so I just proved it was equivalent to travelling salesman.