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Why the Job Search Sucks (2018)

80 points by NetOpWibby 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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brailsafe 5y ago
The author and I seem to have a lot in common, in terms of what the interviewing experience has been like. They go on to say in this thread that they "Obviously" found gainful employment, and I'm happy they did, because it's only gotten worse. I was struggling with the exact same thing between 2016 and 2018, then gave up and eventually found something in late 2019, only to lose it again at the beginning of the pandemic. Since then, I haven't found something. It's just been an endless series of this kind of garbage. Reading this post reminds me of this current fucking week. The closest I've come so far is actually getting an offer from a company who contacted me through the Who's hiring thread. It was something like 5 interviews, and in retrospect they really didn't have their shit together, but they pulled out and cancelled their offer after I asked about how we should handle billing for any time I take off for any reason (so much for their liberal time-off policy), citing that they thought hiring a contractor in Canada was a liability (known up front). Still super salty, and fuck interviewing, god damn.
NetOpWibby 5y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16127697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16127697 Decided to repost this since the URL changed and we cannot edit old submissions.
tsywke44 5y ago
Because the only real way you can say if someone is fit for a job, is to work alongside them for about 1-6 months. The interview system is just there to avoid as many mishires and time wasting as possible
- lbriner 5y ago
  Exactly. So many people complain about how bad interviews are but if you have ever had to risk $10Ks of money on a hire, especially since you might stop looking after employing someone, you employ the best things you can like whiteboard interviews and tech tests. Like most people, I am not looking for perfection, I am looking for a basic level of competence (I've had people who took 10 minutes to split a string in C# by a delimiter) and also to see how they think, how they work under pressure, whether they ask good questions instead of assuming things. At the moment, these are mostly the best ways to tell if someone is a good fit.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    > I've had people who took 10 minutes to split a string in C# by a delimiter Is that bad?
    - tester34 5y ago
      well, it's pretty common operation, so kinda weird.
      - foxfluff 5y ago
        It might just tell you that the person being tested hasn't spent a lot of time with C# recently. Which says little about their competency in general.
        michaelt 5y ago
        Are there any languages other than C and assembler that don't have a function to split a string on delimiters as part of their standard library?
        jpindar 5y ago
        C has one, strtok().
        tpxl 5y ago
- NalNezumi 5y ago
  I think most people are well aware the risk a company take for a hire, and therefore is a weird min-max process of increasing the minimum qualification of the applicant and then select on maximum. People are just frustrated how that is implemented, how asymmetric the time-effort is, and how some of these practices are unjustified(incompetent). And because it's futile to actually complain about this to the company (or often, even while in the company) most people can only vent about it. Sure, if a FAANG level company start the process by asking applicant to do a >hour test I think people would understand. But a Startup, mid-sized company who offer below-medium compensation ask you to solve a business/toy problem that takes more than a half-day in the first/early stage of hiring process there's actually some self-reflection to be done by the company too.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    > I think most people are well aware the risk a company take for a hire There is no way the risk is as high as hiring managers estimates, so no, I don't think people are aware of them. They seem aware of some phantom risks communicated by the people hired to reduce them.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      How much time and effort do you put in before you buy a new home? Similar amounts of money involved, so similar amounts of considerations before choosing. Doesn't matter that it is a company spending the money, if the company spends a lot of money on the new hire then it is reasonable to spend a lot of money vetting the hire.
      - marcosdumay 5y ago
        That's either a very cheap home or a very expensive hire. Yes, they can reach similar levels. Large companies are a bit more relaxed about spending that amount of money than individuals, but yeah, on those cases where there is a large hiring bonus (or rather don't, increase the salary instead) or the person can make an exorbitant amount of damage on the first month, it's worth investing a lot more on the hiring process.
kiwiboy101 5y ago
Here in New zealand. The person who does the hiring is usually not the business owner... The money doesnt come out of his/her pocket... so they interview people when they need someone just to have fun honestly lol. I currently work in a factory because i couldnt find a job in IT and i got this job in 1 fucking interview lol..and i love it
- kiwiboy101 5y ago
  and i am going for further studies.. I think spending 5 years as a web developer is enough here in auckland .. I need to study more and specialize in a computer science area. Someone correct me if i am wrong .
  - NetOpWibby 5y ago
    I highly recommend having small/side projects. They don't even need to be super complex but they'll better help you learn faster.
Twisol 5y ago
I recently had an interview where I had about 40 minutes to implement a particular data structure. This was after completing an intial take-home of significantly more complexity (think, reading and implementing published specifications), for which I waited a month before I followed up and found they simply hadn't reviewed my application yet. I thought I had a good rapport with the interviewer; I explained my thought processes in real-time, identified domain considerations I'd want to explore, and highlighted places where I was doing something less efficient for the sake of getting something working first. I left the interview feeling pretty good that I'd represented myself well. I followed up a week later and learned they had rejected me; apparently I wasn't focused on the problem (??), and I used the wrong data structures. Okay. 40 minutes is too short to expect a perfect solution -- unless you're hiring for memorization, in which case yeah, I'm not going to be a good fit, your pipeline did its job. (I went back, looked up what they were ostensibly looking for, and built it up from scratch. It took twice as long as I was given to implement to my satisfaction, and it was only a couple of transformations away from where I had originally left it to go from correct to correct-and-efficient.) I won't name the company (I still think they're pretty great overall), but this was a pretty sour and confusing experience. (If anyone there reads this: hi, no hard feelings, we've all got to rant sometimes.)
- zhdc1 5y ago
  When you have a large enough number of qualified candidates, you look for any reason you can to justify why you picked one person over everyone else. Assuming that the hire wasn't already pre-selected (which is very possible), you were likely given the quickest answer the interviewer could come up with that sounded reasonable.
  - Twisol 5y ago
    Friends have suggested much the same, yeah. It feels unlikely due to a few factors, but I'm very willing to chalk that up to naivete on my part. (If nothing else, it's a convenient fiction that allows one to move on.)
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    When you have a large enough number of qualified candidates, you look for any reason you can to justify why you picked one person over everyone else. Yes. Also, a lot of companies operate under the principle of, "It's better to turn away ten good engineers than hire one bad one."
lordnacho 5y ago
I think people need to be down with how to actually get a job. It varies across industries so I can't speak generally, but I can say how my view has changed over the years, from being naive and a bit bitter to being quite happy with my most recent search. When I was young there wasn't much choice. I had no network, I didn't know anything about my industry, and I didn't know anything about how hiring was done. First of all, network 1. A huge number of jobs are not actually open to anyone other than a specific person who is known to the hiring manager already. Someone they've worked with or a second level connection. I refer people all the time to jobs now, and the hit rate is way higher than the anon rate. Network 2. Recruiters. The good ones will meet up with you, ask you for advice, and generally tend to a huge number of connections. Your main thing to do here is to play the long game. Demonstrate that you're a person who is of interest, if you're lucky as both the product and the customer. Then keep in touch, ping them now and again on LinkedIn. You will get some calls and the hit rate is higher than anon, lower than network 1 but with way more volume. As for the interview process itself, it helps you a lot to have a lot of leads. You feel bad if you have one lead and you blow it. If you have two or three you'll be more relaxed, plus you can negotiate with ease. You can take a bigger view of processes that you don't like, eg whiteboarding is more of a lottery when you have a whole bunch to do, and you don't take it as personally. People who don't get back to you, oh well, would you want to work there? I guess a fair bit of it is psychological management, but that's important to make a good impression and to be able to judge the jobs better.
- Twisol 5y ago
  > You feel bad if you have one lead and you blow it. This one hits pretty hard for me; I have a hard time maintaining multiple leads at once. I think it's more psychological than actual, but it feels a bit unnatural to put myself out there, as such -- I feel better (on the one hand at least) when I only have to worry about one interaction at a time. I think it's still something I'll have to learn how to do, unfortunately. Thanks for outlining it so clearly.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    I felt the same way as you. I like to focus on one thing. I think it's more psychological than actual Amen. Absolutely 100% this for me. I just completed an engineering job search that took about four weeks. I did ~40 phone/video calls for ~10 companies. Admittedly ~10 of those calls were simple screener calls which basically just check to see if you have a pulse and can speak in complete sentences. If those two things are true the recruiter shifts into "salesperson mode" and tells you how great the company is and gets you scheduled for the "real" interview(s). So let's call it ~30 "real" calls. Emotionally this was extremely exhausting for me. I'm the type of person that is very sociable but needs time to recharge afterward because I put a lot of energy into each interaction. But, I'm typing this to perhaps give you some hope! The process was very difficult for me in the beginning but it did get easier in the end. With each call I could feel myself getting a little better at it and I felt a little more relaxed. I think these sorts of numbers are just the reality now. Even though the current market is GREAT for software engineers, the remote-only shift means that there are a LOT of candidates for every job. It feels like there are 1,000,000 jobs and 500,000 candidates which is theoretically good for us except that we're competing against all 499,999 of the other candidates for every single job hahaha
pelasaco 5y ago
I went to a similar process to work in the company that I always dreamed to work on: - First interview, HR: 30 minutes - Second round, Code test: 3 hours, I passed - Third round: Interview with my possible manager (30 minutes), I passed. Then I was informed there were 2 more rounds (a system engineer interview, and a diversity manager). 1 hour each, fine. We can do it. Then out of the blue, I get an email from another HR employee saying that they are testing a new hiring process and now I would have to go through a 2 x 90 minutes pair programming session, with two different engineers, then talk with one engineering manager, then the diversity one, then if everything went well, I would get a job offer (until this point, we didn't even talk about money).. So, basically I'm just giving up on that. It makes me actually sad, because I invested so much energy in the code test, understanding the product, reading actually part of the source code of the product, to come to the meeting with my possible manager as well prepared as possible.. In the end I had the impression that the hiring manager wanted me in the team, but the second HR person didn't really care about it. I was just one more task in his TODO list. EDIT: And actually my question to HN would be: Should I inform the hiring manager why I'm giving up on that?
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Tell them you were tested once and don't care to be tested again. They can make a decision based on the information they already have.
- ptr 5y ago
  Yes please inform the hiring manager.
- Nursie 5y ago
  Depends how generous you're feeling, but it might give the hiring manager ammunition to try to get the process changed. IMHO That third round should have been rolled into one longer session (no more than 2 hours). Anything any more convoluted than that is just eating the candidate's time because your processes are bad. Then adding more hurdles... nah. Companies so often miss that you can have a probation period, try someone out in the role, which will give you a much better idea of how it's going to work than selecting for people who will tolerate your byzantine hiring oddyssey
toolslive 5y ago
Anyone had a "bait & switch"? In essence: You applied for job X but "Yeah that job has been filled, but maybe you're interested in Y?" (X can be Haskell, CTO, .... and Y can be Php, architect, ....)
- Deestan 5y ago
  Sure. On both sides. It's just a thing that happens? You've made a hiring decision, but you still have 2 strong candidates from the process that you know are good hires for other positions so why not ask what they feel about it?
  - toolslive 5y ago
    Well, what happened was that they let me come over (I took the bait), and 15 minutes into the first interview, they performed the magic switch.
- HanaShiratori 5y ago
  This happens ever now and then in the company I work for. Sometimes we have a good candidate who doesn't make it for the position they initially apply for, so our hiring managers offer them a similar position that might be a good fit as well (after talking to the manager of the other team). But this is not intentional bait, rather offering more opportunities for both sides and totally legit in my eyes. And it worked out well - at least for the company I work at...
- forinti 5y ago
  I once went to an interview and was told that the job had been taken but that they "still wanted to have a chat with me". You just can't steal people's time like that.
- mehphp 5y ago
  I don't think that's a bait and switch. It's totally possible that the position got filled, and they are still interested in hiring you. I can see how that would be frustrating on your end, but I wouldn't immediately attribute it to malice.
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roland35 5y ago
I have worked on a team trying to improve our hiring process before and there are lots of things we tried to balance such as the candidate's time, our interviewing engineers time, and trying to be thorough and fair. We obviously want to hire capable engineers but need to be mindful that senior engineers understandably don't want to have to jump through lots of hoops! We found that doing a simple coding exercise (not leetcode) together is one of the best stages we have. It gives us a great insight into how they approach a problem, if they think about things before jumping in, and how they communicate. All those things are missed for a take home assignment.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  I genuinely believe that an experienced engineer can accurately gauge a candidate's ability in just 15 minutes one-on-one, talking through a programming/real-world problem, and far more information gathered during that time than any of these 2-3 hour processes involving Leetcode or similar.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
I have a saying: "How you hire, is who you hire." It starts with the opportunity's description and it goes forward from there. The emails, the calls, etc. If you pick up a "smell", keep it in mind. What annoys me most is the presumption most outfits seems to have that they hold all the cards. That they are The Only option. If they don't yet understand - i.e., it's 2022 - it's a relationship that a red flag. Those are difficult to ignore. In a proper adult relationship the karma, the comms, the love, etc. must flow both ways. Or else, sooner rather than later, one side will be looking for a break up / divorce. Other than that, be mindful of your CV. If your "profile" has a look & feel like most others then you will naturally struggle to stand out (read: get interviews). It takes effort, but the wisest thing you can do is try to nudge the balance of power back in your favor.
nbzso 5y ago
To stay sane in the interview process you must apply "mental" automation. The goal is to reduce emotional pressure. Treat interview process with balanced emotion. Write down responses that you will repeat. Make a bullet list. Don't expect response or some communication etiquette. Make your rules and stick with them. If you have a company in mind, and HR process is not adequate, don't work with this company. Companies who are treating the interview process with HR hostility are not ones that you want to work for. If you don't have network in place and your work is under NDA, create a project which will represent your skillset. Put your current skils infront, your experience and accomplishments behind. Companies search for the best "deal", not the best possible candidate. HR is broken by design. It will not be in your interest. It always will be driven by employer requirements and HR mallice.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  "mental" automation [...] Write down responses that you will repeat. Just completed a long job search and this is spot-on. I wish I could go back in time and show this to myself. I interviewed with quite a few companies. There is a pool of about 20 stock questions that interviewers ask. Each interviewer will ask maybe 5-10 stock questions and a few you haven't heard before, whose responses typically be cobbled together from other things you've mentally rehearsed. Give yourself some sample interviews. Write down your responses or rehearse them verbally, whatever works for you. By the end of my job search, one of my challenges was actually forcing myself to take a pause for "thought" before answering one of these stock questions. So that the interviewer hopefully wouldn't know I was repeating something I'd "rehearsed." It's important to note that while I was "rehearsing" things, my answers were always 100% genuine. They were my feelings and experiences. In other words, I wasn't rehearsing the act of simply telling the interviewers what they wanted to hear. I was rehearsing the act of digging through 20+ years of engineering experience to think of good examples and stories with which to answer common questions like "tell me about a project where you overcame adversity."
DeathArrow 5y ago
In my country we have a website where many employers are anonymously rated by employees. There are also details about salary by position, how interviews are done and a forum for questions. It is a life saver since seeing company X has poor ratings and reading trough reviews and seeing why employees dislike working for it will allow you to not wasted time. Also, you can see what are top rated companies and why people like to work for them so you can try to find open positions at those companies. This might also have the effect that "bad" companies will find new employees harder, so they might have an incentive to improve their situation.
Rygu 5y ago
I like zero-bullshit, engineer-targeting We're hiring pages like this one: https://texts.com/jobs https://texts.com/jobs
- tpxl 5y ago
  > We don't do whiteboard/algorithm interviews. We'll talk about things you've previously worked on and then do a work trial for a week – you'll be paid as a contractor for this. This is nice.
  - draw_down 5y ago
    Look, if you prefer this because it saves you going through a battery of interviews, that's your prerogative. But there's no way this scheme benefits the candidate overall. In what context is that trial week happening? You've already quit your previous job for a chance at this one? If at the end of the week they decide to pass... then what? You're just unemployed? There are no silver bullets here. Personally I'd rather go through a series of interviews while keeping my job, than end up on the wrong side of a "trial period".
  - mehphp 5y ago
    Yes but a little risky for the engineer if they are currently gainfully employed.
    - tpxl 5y ago
      You don't have to divulge company secrets, talk about public knowledge from the company, ie frontend design (React, Angular, whatever), any outer facing APIs (REST, SOAP, RabbitMQ, whatever) and stuff that is public knowledge, ie. stuff from blog posts or general knowledge (like GCP/AWS/...). Besides that, you can always just not say what company something occurred at or be vague enough.
      - stnmtn 5y ago
        More the part where you're contracted on trial for a week. How do you do that will a fulltime job?
sdiupIGPWEfh 5y ago
Had an experience like this recently with a certain media streaming hardware company that starts with an "R". Their process had six points of contact, starting with an initial technical phone screen (with a language feature quiz), an hour long algorithm session (actually surprisingly fair), and then four more 45 minute interviews after that. They'd made a point of saying how good they were at getting back to people in 24 hours, and then they ghosted me. As far as I could tell, it was going alright, too.
gunnr15 5y ago
Technical interviews are only good at indicating whether or not someone is good at Technical interviews. The best way to figure out if someone is a culture fit? Ship code with them. If you can start off on a contract, do that. It is the best way to even out the power dynamic of the interview process. If you are not in a place where you can do that, check out what we are building at www.commit.dev to Re-build career transitions around the engineer.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  When I'm the interviewer, I don't do whiteboard/CoderPad exercises. As a candidate, they make me nervous. But, I do think they can be a decent part of a larger interview process. I've had some very reasonable whiteboard exercises where the interviewers were very clear that the problem was tricky and I wasn't necessarily expected to solve it - the emphasis was on conversation and hearing my thought process. I actually enjoyed some of them. If you can start off on a contract, do that. It is the best way to even out the power dynamic of the interview process. I agree in principle but in practicality, there are some difficulties such as needing healthcare coverage for my family. (Yes, the US system of employer-subsidized healthcare is utterly broken, but that's what I'm dealing with) Counterpoint: why not just just take a fulltime job and quit / move on if it's not a good fit?
  - pm_me_your_quan 5y ago
    >Counterpoint: why not just just take a fulltime job and quit / move on if it's not a good fit? The company doesn't want to be on the hook for unemployment or wrongful termination I think. > I agree in principle but in practicality, there are some difficulties such as needing healthcare coverage for my family. (Yes, the US system of employer-subsidized healthcare is utterly broken, but that's what I'm dealing with) I actually did this for my last job, because I'm terrible at interviewing (I both hate practicing leetcode, and have fairly bad anxiety). I had the same concern as you, and the way I got around it was to ask for them to pay me on contract an amount equivalent to what my salary would be AND benefits. I guess if you're employed then that doesn't work so well, but as an unemployed (at the time) person it worked out great.
leet_thow 5y ago
A lot of companies are dysfunctional and their hiring managers are incompetent. Never take it personally or let it affect your self esteem. I witnessed this first hand in 2018 when doing rounds via Triplebyte. A good proportion of those companies who rejected me either went under or are about to go under. Luckily for me I landed at a publicly traded employer and my former employer had their liquidity event. I don't plan to interview ever again if not absolutely necessary.
tboyd47 5y ago
> What's wrong with your process that you need more than three steps? Thank you. This needs to be said louder, and repeated more. A phone screen, a tech screen, and a brief in-person interview is enough to hire someone. If your interview process requires someone already working to take a whole day off of work, then you aren't going to get the top-tier candidates you say you want. The sad truth is that lots of companies claiming on paper to be "hiring" aren't actually trying to hire anyone. The job opening either exists to satisfy some corporate compliance checklist, or to convince some executive-level person demanding higher productivity that they're "working on it".
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  A phone screen, a tech screen, and a brief in-person interview is enough to hire someone. I'm torn on this. I just went through a long job search process. Multistep interview processes are grueling and they impose a particular burden on folks who already have jobs, folks with anxiety disorders or other factors that make interviews even more grueling, etc. HOWEVER. The most valuable interviews of my career were those "extra" ones where I chatted with actual team members I'd be working alongside. I asked them about strengths and pain points of working at Company XYZ on a daily basis and got some great insights. Those kinds of interviews are the ones where you can find out if their build pipeline sucks, get a sense of the level of technical debt they're carrying, etc. Absolutely priceless in my decision process. I feel confident about the company I selected vs. feeling like I'm just rolling the dice.
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stagger87 5y ago
Employers can't give you feedback because the people before you have responded by crying, arguing, threatening discrimination, you name it. Most people don't seem able to take constructive feedback.
erehweb 5y ago
The other fun development is take-home Data Science problems, where you have to spend a weekend, you're never quite sure if your results are good enough (you can always improve a model), and then they want the regular panel of interviews on top of that as well.
wonderwonder 5y ago
Most of my interviews are just very general tech questions, what is a class, what is an object, etc. I have had one where I had to implement a take home project once in react. I had never used react before so it was a challenge coming from vanilla JS but I did it in about 4 hours (it was a pretty easy project) and got the job. I have never had an interview of more than 3 steps. 1. Speak to the recruiter 2. Speak to the hiring manager. 3. speak to the team. I have never done one but I have to imagine a white board, FAANG style interview would be incredibly stressful and time consuming. I had a job I was interviewing for once where I went in for the interview, everything went well and they asked me to come in for a second round which would consist of a paid full day of work in their office. I declined. I appreciate that they would have paid me, but I just could not see investing an entire day into an awkward shadowing process. Company seemed good though, I wish them well. Current job was speaking with a recruiter (who was very hard to understand), speaking with the vp, and then speaking with the owner. Each step of the process I raised my asking rate. Got the offer for what I wanted the day after the interview with the owner.
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xyzelement 5y ago
I hope the author found gainful employment, but this post seems self-unaware which may part of be why he gets rejected. He concludes the interviewers/process are bad, because he thinks he "aced it". There's no consideration that he may not have done as well as he thought. People like that are hard to work with, because they react this way to everything. Bad feedback on code review? "I thought my code was great, it's the reviewer that sucks." Nobody wants to work with people like this and they are almost never as good technically as they think. They work hard to not see their own shortcomings so they don't fix them. I don't know the poster, he may not be the type I describe, just how the post vibes with me.
- NetOpWibby 5y ago
  Hi, poster here! I wrote this post when I was super salty about the situation. Obviously I found gainful employment but that still is the worst interview experience I ever had. I'm forever nervous with coding challenges, I'm definitely not super confident with anything I write in less than 30 minutes to never see again.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    When your blog looks like this: My kid brought home a kitten [KITTEN.JPG] entire blog post [1] http://something.com/image/KITTEN.JPG http://something.com/image/KITTEN.JPG [2] http://elsehwhere.net/another/image.jpg http://elsehwhere.net/another/image.jpg ...where none of that has an actual clickable link ...it is not even remotely obvious that you found gainful employment
    - NetOpWibby 5y ago
      I meant to put "in the time since this post." I've never heard of three-year unemployment in the tech field but I suppose anything is possible. I converted my blog from HTML to just TXT. The references still work, even though no hyperlinking exists.
dtoms 5y ago
it's broken. - FAANG makes you jump through hoops because they are screening people out. - 30 engineer companies adopt it. Then complain they can't hire, or can't hire Sr. Engineers. They should be screening in. - "bad hires cost too much". What does it cost to have 15 hours of interview time, multiple times a week, for your engineers doing the interviews? Learn to hire cheaper and fire faster. - All new grads post 2010(or whatever) spent the last 2 years of their degree doing the rote problem memorization and continue it throughout their career as they job hop every 1.5 years leaving a pile of tech debt behind them. its normalized. you see it in these comments here. - its just 2 leetcode medium questions. THERE ARE 2000+ LEET CODE MEDIUM QUESTIONS. What are you really trying to gauge here? You want me to recurse a tree? Tell me ahead of time? Oh, that would be memorizing? So the solution is...go memorize a lot more? What happens to anyone with anxiety or OCD when they run into that? - just a saw a job for a "CI/CD Engineer" first requirement? Full stack distributed systems engineer. Job? Write jenkins pipelines - just as a job for a "QE Automation Architect" first requirement? Debug distributed systems in production. Manage AWS. "What you'll do? Write test frameworks". Uh...right. - Why are we hiring house painters to do plumbing, and vice verse. Different jobs actually require different skills. it's broken and i'm salty
fatboy93 5y ago
I was more or less unemployed during the last financial year due to a variety of reason including burnout. I work in computational biology and mostly self-learned at that, so I've been trying to brush up on programming and such. One of the "memorable" interviews that I had included: 1. HR Round over phone 2. Programming test: I'm mostly an R guy, but the test involved python a ton. So had to learn that 3. Meeting with a Team-manager 4. Meeting with the Team 5. Live programming test 6. Diversity meet 7. Another HR meet 8. Interview with their Tech. officer etc A total of 4 days, between the assignments and such stuff. Of course I'd openly told that I was under-qualified for the round 5 and I'd already expended 3 days for the interview. Still had to proceed with round 5 and I just laughed at their faces when they couldn't understand why my domain knowledge didn't give what they wanted. Or why I didn't care to learn XYZ when I never heard/use it before. Not everyone needs a CS guy and at the end of the day, nobody's reinventing the wheel over and over again that justifies interviews being 10s of hours long. Probably the best interviews that I've given are just face to face and doesn't waste too much time for all the people involved. My current job had just two meetings, one with the team-manager and the other one was to introduce the person that I'd be working with. No pair-programming, no fluff. Got the offer within the month and its probably the least stressful job with ample time to work on my hobbies and spend time with others. Also, a few things that I've noticed/done since then: 1. Use linkedin/indeed or job listings as exactly that. Just notify if the jobs are available. I tend to contact the people hiring directly and explain what I do in an email. This surprisingly works a lot of time. 2. For cold-calls/spam-calls etc, I ask them to check my CV and decide if I'm a fit worth pursuing. I'm not going to spend more than a set number of hours depending on the position the interview is for. 3. Yes, this results in a lower number of interviews. But the ones that I got were significantly of a better quality, both in terms of money, projects and respect. 4. Regarding not everyone needs a CS guy: Most of my field is built by these folks, no disrespect. I'd rather interface with them and get things worked on or make things easier for me than to rub my 2 brain cells that decide when to use a for loop or lapply. 5. Follow-up for the pointer 4 above: I hate programming, but I love documenting stuff. My current job allows me to do that, I'd rather leave programming things to professionals, and rather explain my issues, nuances or thought-processes to them and get things sorted out.

80 points by NetOpWibby 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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The author and I seem to have a lot in common, in terms of what the interviewing experience has been like. They go on to say in this thread that they "Obviously" found gainful employment, and I'm happy they did, because it's only gotten worse. I was struggling with the exact same thing between 2016 and 2018, then gave up and eventually found something in late 2019, only to lose it again at the beginning of the pandemic. Since then, I haven't found something. It's just been an endless series of this kind of garbage. Reading this post reminds me of this current fucking week. The closest I've come so far is actually getting an offer from a company who contacted me through the Who's hiring thread. It was something like 5 interviews, and in retrospect they really didn't have their shit together, but they pulled out and cancelled their offer after I asked about how we should handle billing for any time I take off for any reason (so much for their liberal time-off policy), citing that they thought hiring a contractor in Canada was a liability (known up front). Still super salty, and fuck interviewing, god damn.

NetOpWibby 5y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16127697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16127697 Decided to repost this since the URL changed and we cannot edit old submissions.

tsywke44 5y ago

Because the only real way you can say if someone is fit for a job, is to work alongside them for about 1-6 months. The interview system is just there to avoid as many mishires and time wasting as possible

lbriner 5y ago
Exactly. So many people complain about how bad interviews are but if you have ever had to risk $10Ks of money on a hire, especially since you might stop looking after employing someone, you employ the best things you can like whiteboard interviews and tech tests. Like most people, I am not looking for perfection, I am looking for a basic level of competence (I've had people who took 10 minutes to split a string in C# by a delimiter) and also to see how they think, how they work under pressure, whether they ask good questions instead of assuming things. At the moment, these are mostly the best ways to tell if someone is a good fit.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  > I've had people who took 10 minutes to split a string in C# by a delimiter Is that bad?
  - tester34 5y ago
    well, it's pretty common operation, so kinda weird.
    - foxfluff 5y ago
      It might just tell you that the person being tested hasn't spent a lot of time with C# recently. Which says little about their competency in general.
      - michaelt 5y ago
        Are there any languages other than C and assembler that don't have a function to split a string on delimiters as part of their standard library?
        jpindar 5y ago
        C has one, strtok().
      - tpxl 5y ago
NalNezumi 5y ago
I think most people are well aware the risk a company take for a hire, and therefore is a weird min-max process of increasing the minimum qualification of the applicant and then select on maximum. People are just frustrated how that is implemented, how asymmetric the time-effort is, and how some of these practices are unjustified(incompetent). And because it's futile to actually complain about this to the company (or often, even while in the company) most people can only vent about it. Sure, if a FAANG level company start the process by asking applicant to do a >hour test I think people would understand. But a Startup, mid-sized company who offer below-medium compensation ask you to solve a business/toy problem that takes more than a half-day in the first/early stage of hiring process there's actually some self-reflection to be done by the company too.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  > I think most people are well aware the risk a company take for a hire There is no way the risk is as high as hiring managers estimates, so no, I don't think people are aware of them. They seem aware of some phantom risks communicated by the people hired to reduce them.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    How much time and effort do you put in before you buy a new home? Similar amounts of money involved, so similar amounts of considerations before choosing. Doesn't matter that it is a company spending the money, if the company spends a lot of money on the new hire then it is reasonable to spend a lot of money vetting the hire.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      That's either a very cheap home or a very expensive hire. Yes, they can reach similar levels. Large companies are a bit more relaxed about spending that amount of money than individuals, but yeah, on those cases where there is a large hiring bonus (or rather don't, increase the salary instead) or the person can make an exorbitant amount of damage on the first month, it's worth investing a lot more on the hiring process.

kiwiboy101 5y ago

Here in New zealand. The person who does the hiring is usually not the business owner... The money doesnt come out of his/her pocket... so they interview people when they need someone just to have fun honestly lol. I currently work in a factory because i couldnt find a job in IT and i got this job in 1 fucking interview lol..and i love it

kiwiboy101 5y ago
and i am going for further studies.. I think spending 5 years as a web developer is enough here in auckland .. I need to study more and specialize in a computer science area. Someone correct me if i am wrong .
- NetOpWibby 5y ago
  I highly recommend having small/side projects. They don't even need to be super complex but they'll better help you learn faster.

Twisol 5y ago

I recently had an interview where I had about 40 minutes to implement a particular data structure. This was after completing an intial take-home of significantly more complexity (think, reading and implementing published specifications), for which I waited a month before I followed up and found they simply hadn't reviewed my application yet. I thought I had a good rapport with the interviewer; I explained my thought processes in real-time, identified domain considerations I'd want to explore, and highlighted places where I was doing something less efficient for the sake of getting something working first. I left the interview feeling pretty good that I'd represented myself well. I followed up a week later and learned they had rejected me; apparently I wasn't focused on the problem (??), and I used the wrong data structures. Okay. 40 minutes is too short to expect a perfect solution -- unless you're hiring for memorization, in which case yeah, I'm not going to be a good fit, your pipeline did its job. (I went back, looked up what they were ostensibly looking for, and built it up from scratch. It took twice as long as I was given to implement to my satisfaction, and it was only a couple of transformations away from where I had originally left it to go from correct to correct-and-efficient.) I won't name the company (I still think they're pretty great overall), but this was a pretty sour and confusing experience. (If anyone there reads this: hi, no hard feelings, we've all got to rant sometimes.)

zhdc1 5y ago
When you have a large enough number of qualified candidates, you look for any reason you can to justify why you picked one person over everyone else. Assuming that the hire wasn't already pre-selected (which is very possible), you were likely given the quickest answer the interviewer could come up with that sounded reasonable.
- Twisol 5y ago
  Friends have suggested much the same, yeah. It feels unlikely due to a few factors, but I'm very willing to chalk that up to naivete on my part. (If nothing else, it's a convenient fiction that allows one to move on.)
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  When you have a large enough number of qualified candidates, you look for any reason you can to justify why you picked one person over everyone else. Yes. Also, a lot of companies operate under the principle of, "It's better to turn away ten good engineers than hire one bad one."

lordnacho 5y ago

I think people need to be down with how to actually get a job. It varies across industries so I can't speak generally, but I can say how my view has changed over the years, from being naive and a bit bitter to being quite happy with my most recent search. When I was young there wasn't much choice. I had no network, I didn't know anything about my industry, and I didn't know anything about how hiring was done. First of all, network 1. A huge number of jobs are not actually open to anyone other than a specific person who is known to the hiring manager already. Someone they've worked with or a second level connection. I refer people all the time to jobs now, and the hit rate is way higher than the anon rate. Network 2. Recruiters. The good ones will meet up with you, ask you for advice, and generally tend to a huge number of connections. Your main thing to do here is to play the long game. Demonstrate that you're a person who is of interest, if you're lucky as both the product and the customer. Then keep in touch, ping them now and again on LinkedIn. You will get some calls and the hit rate is higher than anon, lower than network 1 but with way more volume. As for the interview process itself, it helps you a lot to have a lot of leads. You feel bad if you have one lead and you blow it. If you have two or three you'll be more relaxed, plus you can negotiate with ease. You can take a bigger view of processes that you don't like, eg whiteboarding is more of a lottery when you have a whole bunch to do, and you don't take it as personally. People who don't get back to you, oh well, would you want to work there? I guess a fair bit of it is psychological management, but that's important to make a good impression and to be able to judge the jobs better.

Twisol 5y ago
> You feel bad if you have one lead and you blow it. This one hits pretty hard for me; I have a hard time maintaining multiple leads at once. I think it's more psychological than actual, but it feels a bit unnatural to put myself out there, as such -- I feel better (on the one hand at least) when I only have to worry about one interaction at a time. I think it's still something I'll have to learn how to do, unfortunately. Thanks for outlining it so clearly.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  I felt the same way as you. I like to focus on one thing. I think it's more psychological than actual Amen. Absolutely 100% this for me. I just completed an engineering job search that took about four weeks. I did ~40 phone/video calls for ~10 companies. Admittedly ~10 of those calls were simple screener calls which basically just check to see if you have a pulse and can speak in complete sentences. If those two things are true the recruiter shifts into "salesperson mode" and tells you how great the company is and gets you scheduled for the "real" interview(s). So let's call it ~30 "real" calls. Emotionally this was extremely exhausting for me. I'm the type of person that is very sociable but needs time to recharge afterward because I put a lot of energy into each interaction. But, I'm typing this to perhaps give you some hope! The process was very difficult for me in the beginning but it did get easier in the end. With each call I could feel myself getting a little better at it and I felt a little more relaxed. I think these sorts of numbers are just the reality now. Even though the current market is GREAT for software engineers, the remote-only shift means that there are a LOT of candidates for every job. It feels like there are 1,000,000 jobs and 500,000 candidates which is theoretically good for us except that we're competing against all 499,999 of the other candidates for every single job hahaha

pelasaco 5y ago

I went to a similar process to work in the company that I always dreamed to work on: - First interview, HR: 30 minutes - Second round, Code test: 3 hours, I passed - Third round: Interview with my possible manager (30 minutes), I passed. Then I was informed there were 2 more rounds (a system engineer interview, and a diversity manager). 1 hour each, fine. We can do it. Then out of the blue, I get an email from another HR employee saying that they are testing a new hiring process and now I would have to go through a 2 x 90 minutes pair programming session, with two different engineers, then talk with one engineering manager, then the diversity one, then if everything went well, I would get a job offer (until this point, we didn't even talk about money).. So, basically I'm just giving up on that. It makes me actually sad, because I invested so much energy in the code test, understanding the product, reading actually part of the source code of the product, to come to the meeting with my possible manager as well prepared as possible.. In the end I had the impression that the hiring manager wanted me in the team, but the second HR person didn't really care about it. I was just one more task in his TODO list. EDIT: And actually my question to HN would be: Should I inform the hiring manager why I'm giving up on that?

actually_a_dog 5y ago
Tell them you were tested once and don't care to be tested again. They can make a decision based on the information they already have.
ptr 5y ago
Yes please inform the hiring manager.
Nursie 5y ago
Depends how generous you're feeling, but it might give the hiring manager ammunition to try to get the process changed. IMHO That third round should have been rolled into one longer session (no more than 2 hours). Anything any more convoluted than that is just eating the candidate's time because your processes are bad. Then adding more hurdles... nah. Companies so often miss that you can have a probation period, try someone out in the role, which will give you a much better idea of how it's going to work than selecting for people who will tolerate your byzantine hiring oddyssey

toolslive 5y ago

Anyone had a "bait & switch"? In essence: You applied for job X but "Yeah that job has been filled, but maybe you're interested in Y?" (X can be Haskell, CTO, .... and Y can be Php, architect, ....)

Deestan 5y ago
Sure. On both sides. It's just a thing that happens? You've made a hiring decision, but you still have 2 strong candidates from the process that you know are good hires for other positions so why not ask what they feel about it?
- toolslive 5y ago
  Well, what happened was that they let me come over (I took the bait), and 15 minutes into the first interview, they performed the magic switch.
HanaShiratori 5y ago
This happens ever now and then in the company I work for. Sometimes we have a good candidate who doesn't make it for the position they initially apply for, so our hiring managers offer them a similar position that might be a good fit as well (after talking to the manager of the other team). But this is not intentional bait, rather offering more opportunities for both sides and totally legit in my eyes. And it worked out well - at least for the company I work at...
forinti 5y ago
I once went to an interview and was told that the job had been taken but that they "still wanted to have a chat with me". You just can't steal people's time like that.
mehphp 5y ago
I don't think that's a bait and switch. It's totally possible that the position got filled, and they are still interested in hiring you. I can see how that would be frustrating on your end, but I wouldn't immediately attribute it to malice.

deleted 5y ago

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roland35 5y ago

I have worked on a team trying to improve our hiring process before and there are lots of things we tried to balance such as the candidate's time, our interviewing engineers time, and trying to be thorough and fair. We obviously want to hire capable engineers but need to be mindful that senior engineers understandably don't want to have to jump through lots of hoops! We found that doing a simple coding exercise (not leetcode) together is one of the best stages we have. It gives us a great insight into how they approach a problem, if they think about things before jumping in, and how they communicate. All those things are missed for a take home assignment.

wildrhythms 5y ago
I genuinely believe that an experienced engineer can accurately gauge a candidate's ability in just 15 minutes one-on-one, talking through a programming/real-world problem, and far more information gathered during that time than any of these 2-3 hour processes involving Leetcode or similar.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

I have a saying: "How you hire, is who you hire." It starts with the opportunity's description and it goes forward from there. The emails, the calls, etc. If you pick up a "smell", keep it in mind. What annoys me most is the presumption most outfits seems to have that they hold all the cards. That they are The Only option. If they don't yet understand - i.e., it's 2022 - it's a relationship that a red flag. Those are difficult to ignore. In a proper adult relationship the karma, the comms, the love, etc. must flow both ways. Or else, sooner rather than later, one side will be looking for a break up / divorce. Other than that, be mindful of your CV. If your "profile" has a look & feel like most others then you will naturally struggle to stand out (read: get interviews). It takes effort, but the wisest thing you can do is try to nudge the balance of power back in your favor.

nbzso 5y ago

To stay sane in the interview process you must apply "mental" automation. The goal is to reduce emotional pressure. Treat interview process with balanced emotion. Write down responses that you will repeat. Make a bullet list. Don't expect response or some communication etiquette. Make your rules and stick with them. If you have a company in mind, and HR process is not adequate, don't work with this company. Companies who are treating the interview process with HR hostility are not ones that you want to work for. If you don't have network in place and your work is under NDA, create a project which will represent your skillset. Put your current skils infront, your experience and accomplishments behind. Companies search for the best "deal", not the best possible candidate. HR is broken by design. It will not be in your interest. It always will be driven by employer requirements and HR mallice.

JohnBooty 5y ago
"mental" automation [...] Write down responses that you will repeat. Just completed a long job search and this is spot-on. I wish I could go back in time and show this to myself. I interviewed with quite a few companies. There is a pool of about 20 stock questions that interviewers ask. Each interviewer will ask maybe 5-10 stock questions and a few you haven't heard before, whose responses typically be cobbled together from other things you've mentally rehearsed. Give yourself some sample interviews. Write down your responses or rehearse them verbally, whatever works for you. By the end of my job search, one of my challenges was actually forcing myself to take a pause for "thought" before answering one of these stock questions. So that the interviewer hopefully wouldn't know I was repeating something I'd "rehearsed." It's important to note that while I was "rehearsing" things, my answers were always 100% genuine. They were my feelings and experiences. In other words, I wasn't rehearsing the act of simply telling the interviewers what they wanted to hear. I was rehearsing the act of digging through 20+ years of engineering experience to think of good examples and stories with which to answer common questions like "tell me about a project where you overcame adversity."

DeathArrow 5y ago

In my country we have a website where many employers are anonymously rated by employees. There are also details about salary by position, how interviews are done and a forum for questions. It is a life saver since seeing company X has poor ratings and reading trough reviews and seeing why employees dislike working for it will allow you to not wasted time. Also, you can see what are top rated companies and why people like to work for them so you can try to find open positions at those companies. This might also have the effect that "bad" companies will find new employees harder, so they might have an incentive to improve their situation.

Rygu 5y ago

I like zero-bullshit, engineer-targeting We're hiring pages like this one: https://texts.com/jobs https://texts.com/jobs

tpxl 5y ago
> We don't do whiteboard/algorithm interviews. We'll talk about things you've previously worked on and then do a work trial for a week – you'll be paid as a contractor for this. This is nice.
- draw_down 5y ago
  Look, if you prefer this because it saves you going through a battery of interviews, that's your prerogative. But there's no way this scheme benefits the candidate overall. In what context is that trial week happening? You've already quit your previous job for a chance at this one? If at the end of the week they decide to pass... then what? You're just unemployed? There are no silver bullets here. Personally I'd rather go through a series of interviews while keeping my job, than end up on the wrong side of a "trial period".
- mehphp 5y ago
  Yes but a little risky for the engineer if they are currently gainfully employed.
  - tpxl 5y ago
    You don't have to divulge company secrets, talk about public knowledge from the company, ie frontend design (React, Angular, whatever), any outer facing APIs (REST, SOAP, RabbitMQ, whatever) and stuff that is public knowledge, ie. stuff from blog posts or general knowledge (like GCP/AWS/...). Besides that, you can always just not say what company something occurred at or be vague enough.
    - stnmtn 5y ago
      More the part where you're contracted on trial for a week. How do you do that will a fulltime job?

sdiupIGPWEfh 5y ago

Had an experience like this recently with a certain media streaming hardware company that starts with an "R". Their process had six points of contact, starting with an initial technical phone screen (with a language feature quiz), an hour long algorithm session (actually surprisingly fair), and then four more 45 minute interviews after that. They'd made a point of saying how good they were at getting back to people in 24 hours, and then they ghosted me. As far as I could tell, it was going alright, too.

gunnr15 5y ago

Technical interviews are only good at indicating whether or not someone is good at Technical interviews. The best way to figure out if someone is a culture fit? Ship code with them. If you can start off on a contract, do that. It is the best way to even out the power dynamic of the interview process. If you are not in a place where you can do that, check out what we are building at www.commit.dev to Re-build career transitions around the engineer.

JohnBooty 5y ago
When I'm the interviewer, I don't do whiteboard/CoderPad exercises. As a candidate, they make me nervous. But, I do think they can be a decent part of a larger interview process. I've had some very reasonable whiteboard exercises where the interviewers were very clear that the problem was tricky and I wasn't necessarily expected to solve it - the emphasis was on conversation and hearing my thought process. I actually enjoyed some of them. If you can start off on a contract, do that. It is the best way to even out the power dynamic of the interview process. I agree in principle but in practicality, there are some difficulties such as needing healthcare coverage for my family. (Yes, the US system of employer-subsidized healthcare is utterly broken, but that's what I'm dealing with) Counterpoint: why not just just take a fulltime job and quit / move on if it's not a good fit?
- pm_me_your_quan 5y ago
  >Counterpoint: why not just just take a fulltime job and quit / move on if it's not a good fit? The company doesn't want to be on the hook for unemployment or wrongful termination I think. > I agree in principle but in practicality, there are some difficulties such as needing healthcare coverage for my family. (Yes, the US system of employer-subsidized healthcare is utterly broken, but that's what I'm dealing with) I actually did this for my last job, because I'm terrible at interviewing (I both hate practicing leetcode, and have fairly bad anxiety). I had the same concern as you, and the way I got around it was to ask for them to pay me on contract an amount equivalent to what my salary would be AND benefits. I guess if you're employed then that doesn't work so well, but as an unemployed (at the time) person it worked out great.

leet_thow 5y ago

A lot of companies are dysfunctional and their hiring managers are incompetent. Never take it personally or let it affect your self esteem. I witnessed this first hand in 2018 when doing rounds via Triplebyte. A good proportion of those companies who rejected me either went under or are about to go under. Luckily for me I landed at a publicly traded employer and my former employer had their liquidity event. I don't plan to interview ever again if not absolutely necessary.

tboyd47 5y ago

> What's wrong with your process that you need more than three steps? Thank you. This needs to be said louder, and repeated more. A phone screen, a tech screen, and a brief in-person interview is enough to hire someone. If your interview process requires someone already working to take a whole day off of work, then you aren't going to get the top-tier candidates you say you want. The sad truth is that lots of companies claiming on paper to be "hiring" aren't actually trying to hire anyone. The job opening either exists to satisfy some corporate compliance checklist, or to convince some executive-level person demanding higher productivity that they're "working on it".

JohnBooty 5y ago
A phone screen, a tech screen, and a brief in-person interview is enough to hire someone. I'm torn on this. I just went through a long job search process. Multistep interview processes are grueling and they impose a particular burden on folks who already have jobs, folks with anxiety disorders or other factors that make interviews even more grueling, etc. HOWEVER. The most valuable interviews of my career were those "extra" ones where I chatted with actual team members I'd be working alongside. I asked them about strengths and pain points of working at Company XYZ on a daily basis and got some great insights. Those kinds of interviews are the ones where you can find out if their build pipeline sucks, get a sense of the level of technical debt they're carrying, etc. Absolutely priceless in my decision process. I feel confident about the company I selected vs. feeling like I'm just rolling the dice.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

stagger87 5y ago

Employers can't give you feedback because the people before you have responded by crying, arguing, threatening discrimination, you name it. Most people don't seem able to take constructive feedback.

erehweb 5y ago

The other fun development is take-home Data Science problems, where you have to spend a weekend, you're never quite sure if your results are good enough (you can always improve a model), and then they want the regular panel of interviews on top of that as well.

wonderwonder 5y ago

Most of my interviews are just very general tech questions, what is a class, what is an object, etc. I have had one where I had to implement a take home project once in react. I had never used react before so it was a challenge coming from vanilla JS but I did it in about 4 hours (it was a pretty easy project) and got the job. I have never had an interview of more than 3 steps. 1. Speak to the recruiter 2. Speak to the hiring manager. 3. speak to the team. I have never done one but I have to imagine a white board, FAANG style interview would be incredibly stressful and time consuming. I had a job I was interviewing for once where I went in for the interview, everything went well and they asked me to come in for a second round which would consist of a paid full day of work in their office. I declined. I appreciate that they would have paid me, but I just could not see investing an entire day into an awkward shadowing process. Company seemed good though, I wish them well. Current job was speaking with a recruiter (who was very hard to understand), speaking with the vp, and then speaking with the owner. Each step of the process I raised my asking rate. Got the offer for what I wanted the day after the interview with the owner.

deleted 5y ago

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xyzelement 5y ago

I hope the author found gainful employment, but this post seems self-unaware which may part of be why he gets rejected. He concludes the interviewers/process are bad, because he thinks he "aced it". There's no consideration that he may not have done as well as he thought. People like that are hard to work with, because they react this way to everything. Bad feedback on code review? "I thought my code was great, it's the reviewer that sucks." Nobody wants to work with people like this and they are almost never as good technically as they think. They work hard to not see their own shortcomings so they don't fix them. I don't know the poster, he may not be the type I describe, just how the post vibes with me.

NetOpWibby 5y ago
Hi, poster here! I wrote this post when I was super salty about the situation. Obviously I found gainful employment but that still is the worst interview experience I ever had. I'm forever nervous with coding challenges, I'm definitely not super confident with anything I write in less than 30 minutes to never see again.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  When your blog looks like this: My kid brought home a kitten [KITTEN.JPG] entire blog post [1] http://something.com/image/KITTEN.JPG http://something.com/image/KITTEN.JPG [2] http://elsehwhere.net/another/image.jpg http://elsehwhere.net/another/image.jpg ...where none of that has an actual clickable link ...it is not even remotely obvious that you found gainful employment
  - NetOpWibby 5y ago
    I meant to put "in the time since this post." I've never heard of three-year unemployment in the tech field but I suppose anything is possible. I converted my blog from HTML to just TXT. The references still work, even though no hyperlinking exists.

dtoms 5y ago

it's broken. - FAANG makes you jump through hoops because they are screening people out. - 30 engineer companies adopt it. Then complain they can't hire, or can't hire Sr. Engineers. They should be screening in. - "bad hires cost too much". What does it cost to have 15 hours of interview time, multiple times a week, for your engineers doing the interviews? Learn to hire cheaper and fire faster. - All new grads post 2010(or whatever) spent the last 2 years of their degree doing the rote problem memorization and continue it throughout their career as they job hop every 1.5 years leaving a pile of tech debt behind them. its normalized. you see it in these comments here. - its just 2 leetcode medium questions. THERE ARE 2000+ LEET CODE MEDIUM QUESTIONS. What are you really trying to gauge here? You want me to recurse a tree? Tell me ahead of time? Oh, that would be memorizing? So the solution is...go memorize a lot more? What happens to anyone with anxiety or OCD when they run into that? - just a saw a job for a "CI/CD Engineer" first requirement? Full stack distributed systems engineer. Job? Write jenkins pipelines - just as a job for a "QE Automation Architect" first requirement? Debug distributed systems in production. Manage AWS. "What you'll do? Write test frameworks". Uh...right. - Why are we hiring house painters to do plumbing, and vice verse. Different jobs actually require different skills. it's broken and i'm salty

fatboy93 5y ago

I was more or less unemployed during the last financial year due to a variety of reason including burnout. I work in computational biology and mostly self-learned at that, so I've been trying to brush up on programming and such. One of the "memorable" interviews that I had included: 1. HR Round over phone 2. Programming test: I'm mostly an R guy, but the test involved python a ton. So had to learn that 3. Meeting with a Team-manager 4. Meeting with the Team 5. Live programming test 6. Diversity meet 7. Another HR meet 8. Interview with their Tech. officer etc A total of 4 days, between the assignments and such stuff. Of course I'd openly told that I was under-qualified for the round 5 and I'd already expended 3 days for the interview. Still had to proceed with round 5 and I just laughed at their faces when they couldn't understand why my domain knowledge didn't give what they wanted. Or why I didn't care to learn XYZ when I never heard/use it before. Not everyone needs a CS guy and at the end of the day, nobody's reinventing the wheel over and over again that justifies interviews being 10s of hours long. Probably the best interviews that I've given are just face to face and doesn't waste too much time for all the people involved. My current job had just two meetings, one with the team-manager and the other one was to introduce the person that I'd be working with. No pair-programming, no fluff. Got the offer within the month and its probably the least stressful job with ample time to work on my hobbies and spend time with others. Also, a few things that I've noticed/done since then: 1. Use linkedin/indeed or job listings as exactly that. Just notify if the jobs are available. I tend to contact the people hiring directly and explain what I do in an email. This surprisingly works a lot of time. 2. For cold-calls/spam-calls etc, I ask them to check my CV and decide if I'm a fit worth pursuing. I'm not going to spend more than a set number of hours depending on the position the interview is for. 3. Yes, this results in a lower number of interviews. But the ones that I got were significantly of a better quality, both in terms of money, projects and respect. 4. Regarding not everyone needs a CS guy: Most of my field is built by these folks, no disrespect. I'd rather interface with them and get things worked on or make things easier for me than to rub my 2 brain cells that decide when to use a for loop or lapply. 5. Follow-up for the pointer 4 above: I hate programming, but I love documenting stuff. My current job allows me to do that, I'd rather leave programming things to professionals, and rather explain my issues, nuances or thought-processes to them and get things sorted out.