4 ms·

Some ideas (from a guy in his 40s who interviews every 6 to 12 months for high paying short-term project work): - 25 years at a single company is working again

by dxy3 6y ago

Some ideas (from a guy in his 40s who interviews every 6 to 12 months for high paying short-term project work): - 25 years at a single company is working against you. Remove all that from your cv and just list the recent stuff you built. - Most of your cv should be description of the repos with links. Cut out and summarise past experience ruthlessly, like you’re refactoring someone else’s old code. - Remove the link to your personal git page, use the other one. On first sight it looks weak - it has some html files and a lot of docs. My first reaction was “meh”. It took me many minutes of browsing to figure out the real meat was in the other repo And then my reaction was “wow”. Most hiring manager don’t have time for this. People are not clicking on the green squares they are clicking on the source repos, you have about 30 seconds of their time. - At this stage you might get bored or unhappy real fast in a job, if you are honest to yourself. Consider selling short term access to deep technical expertise - in your case Mobile Bluetooth on iOS.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Thanks! Well, the long-term work is staying in the CV. I worked for 27 years at one of the most storied and respected Japanese corporations on Earth, at a very deep level. This says a lot about my aptitude, ethics, Honor, Integrity, team dynamics and loyalty. I sure as heck don't want to work for any company that thinks of that as a bad thing. Most of my tech work has been done in the open. I've been doing open-source work for over twenty years; which gives me the advantage of a vast portfolio. I was a hiring manager for 25 years. Hiring people was a very important part of my work. I managed a small, high-functioning team that did image pipeline "engine" code in C++. Getting headcount was a huge battle, and I kept employees for decades. I loved multi-page CVs. "Draw Spunky" tests were absolutely worthless in evaluating people that would become part of my team. Interviews were often very casual affairs, where I'd encourage people to tell me stories about their work. I have a Stack Overflow story that lays out my work in a linear fashion[0], or CV fashion[1]. I kind of like the idea of an SO story. It's fairly direct in pointing to my work. My experience is that the vast portfolio is ignored by hiring managers (recruiters are much, much worse). I used to send links to relevant projects, when applying, only to have them completely ignored, in favor of a 50-line binary tree test. I have come to realize that binary tree tests are "young pass filters," as the only place binary trees actually exist, are in colleges. If a company gives a binary tree test, then I know they aren't interested in me, and are just ticking an "Interviewed old fart" checkbox. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall [1] https://stackoverflow.com/cv/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/cv/chrismarshall
- da39a3ee 6y ago
  To be explicit here, it sounds like you're saying that you don't think you perform well on data structures questions in interviews, for example binary tree questions. Is that right?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    Not really. I just don't practice them. I'm way too busy writing shipping software that has very little use for the kinds of academic exercises in LeetCode/HackerRank stuff. Sometimes, I do great at them. Most are common sense. Usually, I'm mediocre. There's thousands and thousands of energetic folks out there; young and old, that practice these every day, and can usually ace them in an interview. There's no way that I'm even gonna try to compete with them. They'll smoke me. They worked hard for that, and I respect them. I would hope this is indicative of them being good employees, but I can't really see how these tests would indicate that better than a simple conversation. That said, since I've been writing deployed/shipping/sold software for decades, I suspect that I might be doing something right. In fact, today, I am polishing up a simple Observer infrastructure[0] for a mesh networking driver that I'm working on. One of the basics of my workflow, is if I'm working on a project, and see that the part I'm working on might be more generically useful, I stop work on the main project for a day or two, while I break that section out into a general-purpose module. It helps me to write much better software. I'm rather obsessed with Quality, and this practice is one way to get that. I'm not sure that there's LeetCode for that kind of practice, and I can't really see it happening in a timed whiteboard test. It is, however, very easy to see; simply by looking at the GH repo. [0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_GeneralObserver https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_GeneralObserver
    - kopos 6y ago
      This is so well articulated. Thank you.
    - ibeckermayer 6y ago
      I’m a 25 year old developer that’s only been working full time professionally for ~3 years and I came to a very similar conclusion about you regarding the LeetCode style interviews. I’ve always been allergic to bullshit and smelled it clearly and instantaneously when I began wading into that process. Undoubtedly I’ve closed doors and passed up opportunities through my refusal to contort myself to the LeetCode regime. At the same time, the time that I would’ve spent drilling myself on superficial coding puzzles I’ve instead invested in building practical applications for my friend’s business, learning and applying machine learning theory to automate a boring task during an internship, implementing a processor in Verilog and writing an assembler for its ISA that I managed to get running on an FPGA, working on an open source digital contact tracing app, and several other projects. The projects I’ve spent time on are those that I deem to genuinely valuable to society and to my personal skill development in the broadest, most fully integrated conception of ‘valuable’ that I can achieve. To clarify, I could see an counter point being made that LeetCode skills are “valuable” in the sense that I could use them to get a higher paying job at $TECH_CO. But from a higher level perspective, those skills are tailored towards a system (the LeetCode hiring gauntlet) that I think is fundamentally corrupt, and so to spend my energy practicing them for the sake of that system would be corrupting of my integrity. And despite the admonitions I’ve received from supposedly more pragmatic-minded people, I’ve been able to pull together a living and have a budding career to speak of. My job hunts have perhaps been more drawn out and frustrated than the LeetCode crew, but I believe my focus on genuine knowledge and skill development has contributed to my high performance at the jobs I have managed to land. And by being straightforward about my disinterest in hoop jumping and interest in “real skills”, I’ve managed to befriend and work with companies and people that share similar values to me, who in my view are more rewarding to work with and tend to be more likely to succeed in the long run.

by dxy3 6y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Thanks! Well, the long-term work is staying in the CV. I worked for 27 years at one of the most storied and respected Japanese corporations on Earth, at a very deep level. This says a lot about my aptitude, ethics, Honor, Integrity, team dynamics and loyalty. I sure as heck don't want to work for any company that thinks of that as a bad thing. Most of my tech work has been done in the open. I've been doing open-source work for over twenty years; which gives me the advantage of a vast portfolio. I was a hiring manager for 25 years. Hiring people was a very important part of my work. I managed a small, high-functioning team that did image pipeline "engine" code in C++. Getting headcount was a huge battle, and I kept employees for decades. I loved multi-page CVs. "Draw Spunky" tests were absolutely worthless in evaluating people that would become part of my team. Interviews were often very casual affairs, where I'd encourage people to tell me stories about their work. I have a Stack Overflow story that lays out my work in a linear fashion[0], or CV fashion[1]. I kind of like the idea of an SO story. It's fairly direct in pointing to my work. My experience is that the vast portfolio is ignored by hiring managers (recruiters are much, much worse). I used to send links to relevant projects, when applying, only to have them completely ignored, in favor of a 50-line binary tree test. I have come to realize that binary tree tests are "young pass filters," as the only place binary trees actually exist, are in colleges. If a company gives a binary tree test, then I know they aren't interested in me, and are just ticking an "Interviewed old fart" checkbox. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall [1] https://stackoverflow.com/cv/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/cv/chrismarshall

da39a3ee 6y ago
To be explicit here, it sounds like you're saying that you don't think you perform well on data structures questions in interviews, for example binary tree questions. Is that right?
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Not really. I just don't practice them. I'm way too busy writing shipping software that has very little use for the kinds of academic exercises in LeetCode/HackerRank stuff. Sometimes, I do great at them. Most are common sense. Usually, I'm mediocre. There's thousands and thousands of energetic folks out there; young and old, that practice these every day, and can usually ace them in an interview. There's no way that I'm even gonna try to compete with them. They'll smoke me. They worked hard for that, and I respect them. I would hope this is indicative of them being good employees, but I can't really see how these tests would indicate that better than a simple conversation. That said, since I've been writing deployed/shipping/sold software for decades, I suspect that I might be doing something right. In fact, today, I am polishing up a simple Observer infrastructure[0] for a mesh networking driver that I'm working on. One of the basics of my workflow, is if I'm working on a project, and see that the part I'm working on might be more generically useful, I stop work on the main project for a day or two, while I break that section out into a general-purpose module. It helps me to write much better software. I'm rather obsessed with Quality, and this practice is one way to get that. I'm not sure that there's LeetCode for that kind of practice, and I can't really see it happening in a timed whiteboard test. It is, however, very easy to see; simply by looking at the GH repo. [0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_GeneralObserver https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_GeneralObserver
  - kopos 6y ago
    This is so well articulated. Thank you.
  - ibeckermayer 6y ago
    I’m a 25 year old developer that’s only been working full time professionally for ~3 years and I came to a very similar conclusion about you regarding the LeetCode style interviews. I’ve always been allergic to bullshit and smelled it clearly and instantaneously when I began wading into that process. Undoubtedly I’ve closed doors and passed up opportunities through my refusal to contort myself to the LeetCode regime. At the same time, the time that I would’ve spent drilling myself on superficial coding puzzles I’ve instead invested in building practical applications for my friend’s business, learning and applying machine learning theory to automate a boring task during an internship, implementing a processor in Verilog and writing an assembler for its ISA that I managed to get running on an FPGA, working on an open source digital contact tracing app, and several other projects. The projects I’ve spent time on are those that I deem to genuinely valuable to society and to my personal skill development in the broadest, most fully integrated conception of ‘valuable’ that I can achieve. To clarify, I could see an counter point being made that LeetCode skills are “valuable” in the sense that I could use them to get a higher paying job at $TECH_CO. But from a higher level perspective, those skills are tailored towards a system (the LeetCode hiring gauntlet) that I think is fundamentally corrupt, and so to spend my energy practicing them for the sake of that system would be corrupting of my integrity. And despite the admonitions I’ve received from supposedly more pragmatic-minded people, I’ve been able to pull together a living and have a budding career to speak of. My job hunts have perhaps been more drawn out and frustrated than the LeetCode crew, but I believe my focus on genuine knowledge and skill development has contributed to my high performance at the jobs I have managed to land. And by being straightforward about my disinterest in hoop jumping and interest in “real skills”, I’ve managed to befriend and work with companies and people that share similar values to me, who in my view are more rewarding to work with and tend to be more likely to succeed in the long run.