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For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

blog.hackerrank.com

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Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#91

Post by chrisbennet »

NTDF9 wrote: post #31

I read the article as: "It's not enough to be a mediocre engineer for a mediocre paying job. If you want to play in the local tennis league, you better be Roger Federer (without his pay)" I think software engineers should counter-question the interviewers. Interviewers should be allowed to judge the candidate only if they can answer the candidate's questions to them. If the interviewer cannot, he/she is not qualified…

I think sometimes people forget that sometimes the interviewers don't actually want to hire someone.

- They might be afraid of someone who might outshine or compete with them.

- They might not want to train or mentor someone.

- They might think they don't need help.

- They already have someone they want to hire and are just going through the motions of "looking".

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#92

Post by slapresta »

timbofoo wrote: post #66
kafkaesq wrote: post #5

So, how did you get to where you are today? I’ve always been passionate about coding, starting from my early days at Olympiad teams in high school and ACM teams in college. Anyone who's made it onto an Olympiad team[1] of any significant geographical scale, in any category, shouldn't have to deal with this whiteboard nonsense. Maybe a few lightweight-to-medium rounds to verify that they are what they say they are. Bu…

I see the whiteboard coding test as an attitude-test. If you have too much attitude to sit down and write some code for an hour, then you aren't someone I want in my company. It shouldn't be hard if you're skilled. Sorry to be that way, but that's the way I (and we) see it.

So, if they aren't willing to go through whatever random whiteboard bullshit you decide is due, then they can't join your company? Sounds like you're doing them a favor, not the other way around...

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#93

Post by ars »

deftnerd wrote: post #89

The current state of the hiring process in tech companies has really affected me. I'm, by nature, a very shy person who doesn't deal with rejection very well. Because of this, I tend to apply at jobs where my hiring is a slam-dunk because it's so routine and easily within my skill-set. It results in jobs that aren't particularly fulfilling but gives me plenty of time to work on technology I'm interested in my spare t…

Have someone else apply for you. Your wife probably.

You find the job and tell her you are too nervous to apply, let her know it's OK to apply for you.

Sometime seceding that bit of control is enough to get over the problem - especially when you have self awareness of it.

Once she applies you will probably feel an urge to take over and continue the conversation with the employer - so do that, and take it to an interview. (Or have her do it for you, while you hover in the background looking worried and telling her what to say :)

It's kind of a way of forcing/tricking yourself.

(Hopefully she doesn't say something like "man up and do it", ask her not to if you think she might, tell her you need her to help you with this.)

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#94

Post by p4wnc6 »

extrapickles wrote: post #77
p4wnc6 wrote: post #44

Any time a company asks me to do a HackerRank test, I immediately reject them. It's just not possible to have a quality engineering team and to also believe the results of HackerRank tests correspond to on-the-job success. HackerRank is an attempt to commoditize software labor (literally reducing evaluation of your labor fitness to standardized examples). It communicates immediately that creativity is valued less tha…

Full-stack developers should be generalist in nature to make sure the issues that cross domains (front/backend, etc) are taken care of. Also, they can plug any gaps in the development that crop up from time to time (eg: someone on vacation, or next feature needs more back-end people). The downside is that they will not be spectacular or as quick at any one domain. Basically, a full-stack developers specialization is…

The desire for this sort of flexibility is a mistake. It sounds good, but it's naive. It's sort of like saying you want a single class in your OO design to be "flexible" so you make the class into an undifferentiated mess. Having a monolith class that "does it all" is a red flag of bad design. It's truly no different when the layer of abstraction is human software developers being organized for complex business problems. Having "flexible" people whose job is a little bit of everything is a major red flag of a bad design (bad management) that took the lazy way out instead of the harder but unequivocally more successful route of actually meaningfully dividing the workload between clean interfaces and having employees mostly specialize. "Sometimes you just need somebody to work across every system" is just flat out wrong. If you find you need that, it means you've been doing things in a very wrong way and patching over it by commanding positions to be full-stack is only going to perpetuate the problem.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#95

Post by xirdstl »

deftnerd wrote: post #89

The current state of the hiring process in tech companies has really affected me. I'm, by nature, a very shy person who doesn't deal with rejection very well. Because of this, I tend to apply at jobs where my hiring is a slam-dunk because it's so routine and easily within my skill-set. It results in jobs that aren't particularly fulfilling but gives me plenty of time to work on technology I'm interested in my spare t…

Do you like working on those things in your spare time? The flip side of what you seek is that with a more challenging day job, you may not have as much energy or desire to tackle those projects in your spare time.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#96

Post by citizens »

pklausler wrote: post #64
13of40 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, the interviewer might not be doing it consciously. Code just looks better in an IDE, the same way a guy in a suit makes a better first impression than a guy with sneakers and ripped jeans who smells like pee. But that said, if you were interviewing someone and they did all of their algorithmic boxes and lines on the whiteboard but switched to the laptop to write the code, would you ding them for that?

Beats me. I've never worked at a company that would allow a candidate to fire up a laptop during an interview.

I was once asked to set up the interviewers laptop.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#97

Post by im_down_w_otp »

> "Job interviews are difficult by design."

In the tech-sector at least they're not "difficult by design." They're obtuse and absurd due to laziness and lack of rigor applied to the problem space by individual firms as well as the aggregate marketplace.

Almost nobody applies anything remotely resembling a scientific method or includes the massive body of research available in sociology, psychology, and/or neurology for understanding even their own needs as a company trying to accomplish something, let alone building an effective social group (i.e. team) capable of cooperating together to get there given whatever that organization's constraints are.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#98

Post by EliRivers »

deftnerd wrote: post #89

The current state of the hiring process in tech companies has really affected me. I'm, by nature, a very shy person who doesn't deal with rejection very well. Because of this, I tend to apply at jobs where my hiring is a slam-dunk because it's so routine and easily within my skill-set. It results in jobs that aren't particularly fulfilling but gives me plenty of time to work on technology I'm interested in my spare t…

Apply for jobs you've no intention of taking if offered. Use them as practice. Use them to toughen up. Knowing in advance that it doesn't matter, and that you'll never see or hear from the people involved ever again, and that the final outcome - that nothing will change and you're risking nothing - might be liberating enough that you can do it.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#99

Post by [deleted] »

ideal322 wrote: post #4
exabrial wrote: post #3

Nearly every silicon valley interview is based on whether or not you are as hipster as the interviewer. Keep your head up and don't subscribe to the culture. You can be excellent and live as different as you want.

Yes! Don't settle for the wrong culture, and pretend to be someone you are not.

[deleted]

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#100

Post by pyb »

bgribble wrote: post #23
fapjacks wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! I have been interviewing for fun for the last few years (averaging maybe one or two interviews every few months), and I've seen all kinds of stuff. Way too many whiteboards. In fact, even after all these years, whiteboards still make me nervous, and basically makes it impossible to get into flow, or have a reasonably nice mindset for solving problems. And if I do this for fun, you can bet that people who depend…

While I appreciate that this process has been great for you, I would think that it probably sucks for all the engineers and managers whose time you took up interviewing "for fun". Have you ever tried to hire engineers? It is a pain in the ass, and giving serious consideration to every candidate takes up a huge amount of time even before the interview, much less taking a significant chunk of a day for a significant ch…

OK, but what's much more common is companies interviewing candidates 'for fun' It's unbelievable how many companies will spend their time talking to every available developer in town, and end up never hiring anyone.
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