21 ms·

Lessons learned from the recent job hunt

194 points by edent 4y ago

zabzonk 4y ago
> "Senior" is a title with a different meaning everywhere And so is meaningless. Can we just get rid of this "I am a senior" nonsense? Also "I am a junior", come to that.
- ThalesX 4y ago
  Whenever I interview I present myself as a developer with more than a decade of experience that wants $X / year and willing to go a bit lower for the right company. Whatever other categorizations they might have for me, is on the company. Ultimately I don’t really care.
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    Well, ditto. The most meaningless job title I ever wound up with was "Senior Systems Architect" - really only something they could put on my business cards so they could sell me for consultancy gigs. Bah! It's not what they call you, it's what they pay you - call by reference versus call by value, I guess.
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      >The most meaningless job title I ever wound up with was "Senior Systems Architect" hah, when I was employed by the Danish under ministry in charge of standardization (called IT og Telestyrelsen at that time) management people came through one day and asked what titles we wanted, and for various amusing reasons another guy and I said we want to be called "XML Architects". They gave us business cards too!
    - mmmpop 4y ago
      > It's not what they call you, it's what they pay you This is correct because if I'm writing checks, the one making the most is generally my "senior" person. I suppose this doesn't scale well though, especially when you start talking about niche skillsets where being objectively "good" gets conflated with "useful at the moment."
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    >Whenever I interview I present myself as a developer with more than a decade of experience that wants $X / year and willing to go a bit lower for the right company I present myself as someone with plenty of experience in both writing code and software architecture. Someone they direly need and will help their business achieve its goals for at least X amount of money. Which would be a great deal for them even if it doesn't sound cheap in the beginning. Many told me it's too much. But a few have said yes. You should think about the largest amount you think you can obtain. And add 15 - 20 % on top. You will be surprised in finding that someone will say yes.
- alostpuppy 4y ago
  Yes please.
- simplehuman 4y ago
  What should one replace it with?
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    You don't need a replacement - you don't need it in the first place.
- lbriner 4y ago
  That was the point that jumped out to me as well. If we can all start making progression ladders a normal part of a dev team then we recruit for a rung on the ladder rather than an arbitrary title. Then us Devs will be less precious about "That person said I wasn't a Senior", instead we can try and convince our prospective employer that we can e.g. "Consistently produce high quality code", "Is a thought-leader in new frameworks etc." It also allows conversations about salary to be more open since we pay a range for a specific level and not a massive range of 20-100K depending on how good somebody interviews or how much gall they have asking for more than they deserve! see https://www.progression.fyi/ https://www.progression.fyi/
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  ? I found the label to be highly useful as an adjective descriptor. At the highest level it is a way to distinguish between Intelligence and Wisdom. Wisdom requires experience, but experience doesn't indicate Wisdom. A senior role has to be someone who can mentor junior roles and has fairly well developed soft skills. I can put a senior in front of a customer. When choosing between two candidates for a senior role: Candidate A has: Int 16 Wis 10 Candidate B has: Int 14 Wis 12 I would almost always choose Candidate B.
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    And you evaluate Int and Wis scores ... how?
    - wintermutestwin 4y ago
      It was a D&D reference. I figured any geek would grok it. I was just making the point that intelligence alone does not make a good hire for a senior position. Of course the specific methods of evaluation are complex, but I would argue that it is easier to evaluate wisdom by asking experiential questions.
      - zabzonk 4y ago
        > I figured any geek would grok it. I did. I simply don't understand how such scores can be evaluated in real life.
- sdevonoes 4y ago
  Yes, it's meaningless among developers, but not among recruiters. Since I work first and foremost in exchange for money, I make it pretty clear to recruiters that I am "a very senior software architect with knowledge in X, Y and what not under my belt"... and so, I get more offers and got more money when negotiating an offer. Among my colleagues, or when someone (not a recruiter) asks me what I do for a living, I say: I'm a computer programmer.
- throwaway_1928 4y ago
  I believe "Senior" in tech interviews only means: * been around longer and more subject to ageism * more system design questions
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  We can replace senior with guru or master. Or ninja.
lelandfe 4y ago
Interesting how different our job market experiences were. First, only 8 applications! That’s fantastic - I likewise am starting a senior software eng role… but after 6 months of unemployed full time interviewing, and around 80 applications. FE, not BE, though. In terms of content, I think every coding round required time/space complexity analysis, and (as an FE!) most had me doing things like building recursive binary tree checkers, solving medium Leetcode problems, etc. > I made a point of challenging it and asking whether it was representative of the role Yes! Love this. I had a systems design round, which are usually my time to shine, that focused exclusively on designing an app’s database. A DBA I am not, and I essentially flunked. I brought it up to their CTO on a later call, as I really didn’t think that was a fair assessment of me. That wound up being the place that hired me :)
- pranit10 4y ago
  Good to see I am not the only one interviewing a ton. I have a different experience than yours for FE interviews. No leetcode questions. Mostly take home or live coding React/Vanilla JS stuff. No system design rounds either mostly talking about the tech stack in breadth and sometimes in-depth.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    You guys are not alone. My last job search was probably on the order of 100 applications, 10 interviews, 1 offer. It's been this way my whole 20+ year career. I don't know who these Captains Of Industry geniuses are who are getting multiple offers from 20 job applications, but I'm sure it's not the norm.
    - deleted 4y ago
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    - tester756 4y ago
      is this some US thing? here in Eastern EU if you have >= 3 years of xp then probably almost all of companies that are hiring will try to talk to you if you apply ofc if your skills/tech matches their requirements somewhat reasonably
nijave 4y ago
I've always found system design interviews to be a bit... weird. Designing a complex system generally takes at least a few days (at smaller places) up to weeks or months at larger places. In addition, the solutions always seem to be biased towards solutions that fit with existing technology/knowledge (which is good). It's not very easy to encapsulate domain knowledge and research heavy questions into a small interview slot so some of these can feel quite contrived.
- golergka 4y ago
  > Designing a complex system generally takes at least a few days (at smaller places) up to weeks or months at larger places That's designing it completely. In the interview, you're not expected to produce the final result; more importantly, it's not even about the result, but about the thought process and conversation.
  - spyspy 4y ago
    Please. I’ve been asked why I didn’t use specific features of kafka in my solution and “because I’ve never used it before only these other pubsub systems” was not the right answer.
    - golergka 4y ago
      The fact that somebody found a way to misuse a tool (system design interview) doesn't mean that there's something wrong with the tool itself.
    - simplehuman 4y ago
      That anecdote only means the interviewer was bad
      - yunohn 4y ago
        The point is that the open ended question of system design can lead to nonsensical expectations - No True /Interviewer/ fallacy or not.
polote 4y ago
It always baffles me that companies which struggle hiring, can take the decision to reject a candidate like him during the screening process ...
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  Reminds me of this https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  This is way more common than you think and it seems like it's a tragedy of the commons. Companies struggle to hire, yet have crazy demands and interview practices that filter out good candidates with potential, because they're looking for the 'perfect candidate', whatever that means to them. From my experience, the whole shortage in this industry is mostly companies being too picky, because they're afraid of the small chance of letting in a less ideal candidate. And I'm not even talking about unicorns/FAANGs/big-tech, but regular companies.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    yeah but we need to pretend there’s a shortage, so we can import cheap slave-like labour from third-world countries
    - scarface74 4y ago
      There is nothing “cheap” about how much companies pay most H1Bs compared to the average salary in the US. Now the policies and regulations around how they are treated is a different story.
- lbriner 4y ago
  What is baffling? OP explains that they didn't have certain things on their CV. If I was hiring for a JS app and the applicant was all Java or .Net, it is no disrespect to them to filter them out at the CV stage. I can only speak for myself but as a Dev of 20 years, mainly in .Net (but with Java, Obj-C, PHP and JS experience) I wouldn't dream of applying for a JS job because despite the trope, it is not easy for a Senior to switch languages and just pick it up.
deleted 4y ago
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throwaway4good 4y ago
Nice to see the openness about salary. The numbers he quotes (90 uk pounds for remote work) - is that normal for the UK atm?
- jamietanna 4y ago
  Not particularly - in London, or with a lot of high-funding startups it's more common, but across the country no. Makes it much harder for local companies to try and compete, even if they're very big. If you see my salary changes over the last year, it's a considerable jump. Either way, I'm aware I'm gonna be working quite a bit for it :D
  - throwaway4good 4y ago
    Congrats on it. It is apparently a statistical fact that keeping salaries hidden and or confidential causes lower salaries. So what you do here is applauded in our current world of high inflation and record corporate profits.
    - jamietanna 4y ago
      Thanks. Yeah that's why my salaries/compensation detail are all public, so I can try and help nudge the needle a bit towards at least having ranges available everywhere.
  - wirthjason 4y ago
    A comment on the CV. At quick glance it looked like you only worked at places for a year or two then changed. This is generally a red flag for me. But because I saw the salary history I knew there was a Lon time at Capital One. However this was harder to spot on the resume. It might be better to group your experience at a single employer together so your loyalty stands out. I’m curious if employers ever saw your salary posts and responded.
- rjh29 4y ago
  It seems highly variable, I have friends on 110k+ with huge bonuses, I also have friends on 30k. 90k is very high for a fully-remote job IMO.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
>Time consuming >The only company that gave me any compensation for the interview process was GitPod >Another thing to note is that I ended up not really preparing for the interviews. I feel like this is a bit of an arrogant move by me And that's how they get you. You invest into what's essentially a second full time job, without any guaranteed compensation, yet somehow you feel you yourself are the arrogant one for not doing more. That's not even highlighting all the other emotional effects the process had on the author, and the author is by no means "average" in their methodology. Let's push back against this, please.
- golergka 4y ago
  Doesn't the company invest significant amount of money in the process too?
  - diatone 4y ago
    Does “the company” need to sleep?
    - golergka 4y ago
      The company is built by investment from VCs from hedge funds from 401k or pensions of real people who not only need to sleep, but on average make less then senior software engineers.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Wouldn't that be more reason to push back against this? There's an implicit assumption that more sessions -> more security. I've yet to find evidence this session inflation is doing anything beyond making companies feel more secure. Same goes for a lot of other things related to interviewing. If there's no clear evidence, it should be treated as the bread and circuses it is.
    - spyspy 4y ago
      I’ve found that the more people you throw at a candidate the higher the chances that _someone_ is going to find _something_ they don’t like about him/her and burn them in the end, especially when approvals have to be unanimous. I’ve seen engineers give glowing praise for one particular candidate but they got passed on because they made some comment about disliking scrum/agile/jira and that just rubbed the 2nd project manager they interviewed with the wrong way.
durnygbur 4y ago
hahaha booking.com, I got rejected after screening call.. they must be swarmed with geniuses, or they are probing the market for current salaries, or they're looking for someone ready to relocate to Amsterdam for 65k EUR. What an enigma.
fullstackchris 4y ago
> This other company, however, gave me feedback that "if this was how you worked on a team, it'd be perfect, and we love it. But in an interview, that's not what we want" The tech interview process is still so completely broken in my book. Nobody really knows what anybody wants or how to show it 1 hour blocks (for both parties - applicant and employer)
- evandale 4y ago
  It's such baffling feedback. I can't even comprehend what it's supposed to mean or why someone would say it. Are they trying to look for a rock-star interviewer who is a total disaster for the team?
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    It's possible they had a rubric for the interview which implicitly assumed a certain way of answering. Since the whole point in that case is to strictly follow the rubric to lower bias they had to reject.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - akhmatova 4y ago
    Are they trying to look for a rock-star interviewer who is a total disaster for the team? That's one interpretation. Another is that they're scared shitless and have no idea how to go about this other than to cargo-cult as many filter questions they can from other people's process, and then, well, see what happens. Or both.
- deleted 4y ago
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draw_down 4y ago
If you need to go through the “mediocre white male” rigamarole to justify to yourself a better wage, so be it. This MWM is happy for you. I’d maybe go with something more like “I’m worth it” or “having confidence in myself is a good thing on its own” but again, whatever works.
mgaunard 4y ago
There are two types of interview processes: 1) get tested with irrelevant general-purpose problem-solving questions before knowing what the role and team are, 2) get presented the opportunity and assess fitness before doing relevant technical challenges. As a candidate you only want to spend time on 2), not 1). As a company 1) is convenient because it ensures people are somewhat decent before you bother your hardworking engineers.
- dotBen 4y ago
  (former hiring manager here) depends on seniority of role and candidate. If you are interviewing for an Eng I or Eng II role (or even more junior, if the company does that) at a large tech company you are likely going to get a 'blind interview' (where its yet to be decided which project you will work on) and then if you are successful, assigned a team based on need within the organization. It's the reality of how large organizations keep their teams stable with employee turnover and also slightly grow them. Yes, teams will work to fill their roles directly too but often the team will show up for work on a Monday morning to find that they have a new member of their team who they've never met but is an 'extra bonus' or the headcount has been filled anyway. If you are likely to be interviewing for Eng I/II you should not be surprised if parent's option 1) is the route you are presented with - I think it's wrong to say "you only want to spend time on 2)" as it's unrealistic for early career folks and they risk missing out on exceptional opportunities to get a foot in the door.
  - mgaunard 4y ago
    I'd say there are many more advantages to working for a small rather than large organization. Those would be most likely to take a tailored approach to hiring even for juniors. Though of course you should do a bit of large ones as well to see what it's like and put it on your CV.
    - angarg12 4y ago
      Sadly many small companies don't have the means to support juniors. Some don't hire them at all. For the folks out there, the easiest way to join FAANG is as a new grad. Whether you want to do it or not is your decision to make.
tomxor 4y ago
> then in the coding exercises you were asked what the O(n) complexity of time/space were I usually ask people to roughly describe what is meant by computational complexity (sometimes I slot it into the conversation when discussing some code they wrote), or what big O notation is for... assuring them I'm not looking for a formal definition but an understanding and applicability. I probably wouldn't do a great job actually using big O notation to express complexity myself if asked on the spot; however I believe a basic understanding of the underlying concept is invaluable and separates juniors from everyone else. Is this not considered reasonable these days? [edit] To clarify, I think the author was being asked to express their code in big O, I'm just wondering what people think about ask about big O and complexity in general.
- semiquaver 4y ago
  There’s been a move away from requirements for CS degrees in software development over the last decade or so, but that shouldn’t mean that key concepts like asymptomatic complexity are not needed, only that they are sometimes understood at a more intuitive and less academic level. The author is a senior engineer, I have no doubt that they could describe difference between a linear and polynomial-time algorithm and the potential concerns with the latter even if they might not use that terminology because of a trend against academic-sounding lingo.
- returningfory2 4y ago
  > Is this not considered reasonable these days? There's currently a backlash against LeetCode style interviews, and I think one part of this backlash is that dismissing anything that feels LeetCodey (like asking about time complexity) is considered reasonable.
  - twofornone 4y ago
    I abhor everything leetcode (and suck at their puzzles), but I would call O(n) basic foundational theory. Competence in engineering requires an intuitive understanding of at least time complexity. Given that this is software "engineering", it's probably fine if the candidate isn't familiar with big O specifically but they should at least be able to reason about scaling complexity on an interview, I think.
mattbee 4y ago
Well done on landing the position but I wouldn't expect your transparency to be reciprocated from Deliveroo. I tipped a driver £15 through the app the other day, he turns up and thanks me for the £7.50. Shows me his end of the transaction: Tip, £7.50. I was so embarrassed I ran to find a fiver. I guess watch your contract and payslip eh.
1970-01-01 4y ago
Hunt often! If you aren't in love with your current job, just keep looking. A good pace is to apply (to more interesting and overall better jobs) every month.
daniaal 4y ago
Did you have to solve a leetcode problem for the deliveroo interview?
- jamietanna 4y ago
  Nope, it was a different test
  - daniaal 4y ago
    Thanks :)
DeathArrow 4y ago
>Firstly, I'm really glad to say that the interviews I did were not the stereotypical tech interviews. As an industry, it's great to see we're getting better, and moving away from whiteboard coding, dealing with super abstract problems like inverting a binary tree, or doing things that we'd generally just use a Search Engine for in our real jobs. I would expect a junior developer out of college knows data structures and algorithms. That includes knowing what a binary tree is. And if you know what a binary tree is, it isn't terribly difficult to invert it. Why shouldn't a "senior" developer know what a binary tree is? While I don't have much regard for leetcode and hackerrank, I wouldn't want to hire someone who doesn't know about algorithms and data structures and thinks he can solve anything with Google. Sure, many thinks are solvable using Google, but many require knowledge, experience and practice. >Unfortunately one company - who outsourced the first part of their interview process - had something similar to this, which I wasn't impressed with. There were some arbitrary questions around several topics, and then in the coding exercises you were asked what the O(n) complexity of time/space were. The author is even outraged he was asked about time complexity, something even junior programmers shouldn't have a with.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  I don’t like the “trick” questions where you have to think of some very specific approach or else you fail. But I agree that basic knowledge of things like trees and runtime complexity is reasonable. That kind of stuff does come up in actual work.
- avereveard 4y ago
  Memorizing stuff that any reference book can tell you is a waste of time and skill. Knowing when to use a binary tree is much more important. Knowing not to write a binary tree and using a library is a delivery saving skill. At least abstract problems off a whiteboard show candidate problem solving approaches. But dry coding koans are absolutely a waste of time for anyone involved and tend to produce teams that care about knowledge tidbits hoarding instead of, idk, serving the business that pays them producing value. And rest assured, there is no value in writing a binary tree for the business. As a matter of fact if one of my dev doesn't use off the shelf components for these kind of things they'd get a stern talking about time efficiency, security and the likes. Why would I go and stress that at a interview?
germinalphrase 4y ago
There is a lot of questioning and helpful back-and-forth in this thread, so I’ll toss myself in: I have been working as a high school English teacher since 2012. Without a doubt, large parts of this job reinforce and feed my core values. I am acutely aware that my job, and the relationships that I develop, matter in a meaningful way; however, my engagement with the job has shifted over the last three or four years, and I recognize that it is time for me to step away from the classroom. I am not jaded, burned out, or coasting on my commitments. I am merely looking for the next door to open come June. If anyone is willing to connect about UX/UXR, Product Management - my email is in profile.
sdevonoes 4y ago
> Another thing to note is that I ended up not really preparing for the interviews. I feel like this is a bit of an arrogant move by me Well written article. The only part I don't agree with is this though. If I am applying to a company, I do research what the company (and its product) is about. But that's it. I want to know if in my current "shape" and with my current knowledge, I would be a good fit for them. For me, preparing for days or weeks for a tech interview feels like cheating: "Recruiter: design a distributed key-value store. Me thinking: yes! I read how to do that in How to Crack the Coding interview! I'm gonna nail it!... Recruiter after seeing my solution: Wow, let's hire this guy!"
- Deltitt 4y ago
  Yes and everyone is doing it and everyone who is doi.g it is earning 10k more or perhaps even 50k and more just because they do that. They are not better at the job than you are (at least this alone is not an indication) but they still get hired over the other group of people. So I do prepare for my interviews. I'm increasing my chances. And btw I learn things when preparing for an interview so while I don't like it, I still learn.
  - sdevonoes 4y ago
    That's very well. I didn't pretend to say I am doing it right, and others not. > And btw I learn things when preparing for an interview so while I don't like it, I still learn. Well, I'm constantly learning whether or not I'm looking for a job.
    - Deltitt 4y ago
      Yes same as me. But when they want to see I can write a handful of algorithms blind, I'm learning as well just something else than usual.
- bradlys 4y ago
  This is the modern interview practice though. Realistically - you’re not gonna pass at most of the companies here in SV when you’re getting leetcode hards on the regular like I am. Without a lot of practice, you’re gonna fail spectacularly.
dominotw 4y ago
i've been doing this last 1 month too. Its a bizzaro world out there. 1. long application forms that takes a long time to fill with no response or acknowledgment after. eg: https://automattic.com/work-with-us/ https://automattic.com/work-with-us/ 2. recruiters who insist on scheduling on phone call when it can just be an email/text. 3. endless rounds or interviews with all sorts of weird stuff, 1. Take home assignments 2. hackerrank puzzles 3. pair programming on 'real world' problem 4. Open a PR to Open source repo 5. leetcode puzzles with stuff like dynamic programming. with 2 mediums/ 1 hr speed. 6. 'system design' interviews url shorterner with caching/replication/sharding/consistent hashing 7. 'behavior interview' .pre made answers to what was your biggest mistake. how do you resolve confilict with teammates. 8. Debugging sessions to find bugs in existing code. 9. 'real world case study', 1 hr presentation of challenging problem you've solved in ur career. 10. 1 hr 'life story' interview where you showcase your passion for work and life. 11. product design interviews. how will you improve our shitty product.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  It seems to me you have applied to a diverse group of positions. For the same kind of roles, there is some diversity but interviews tend to be more alike.
- akhmatova 4y ago
  Recruiters who insist on scheduling on phone call when it can just be an email/text. Or a video call when a regular phone (or voice-only zoom) would be much easier and quicker on both sides. Endless rounds or interviews with all sorts of weird stuff As if expressly designed to indicate just how worthless your time is, in their view. Its a bizzaro world out there. Yep - it's enough to make you say "F-it, just give me a CRUD job with a boss who isn't an outright asshole".
motohagiography 4y ago
> I thought back to something a friend of mine says, "channel your inner middle-aged white man who'd feel entitled to ask for more". (Note that this is a statement said in jest, based on research that men are more likely to ask for raises, and doesn't have any racist undertones) While I take the joke and sentiment at face value, as a member of said demographic, the word I think they were looking for is "dignity," and while it's a rare quality nobody has a monopoly on, it is precisely the value that institutions try to grind out of you, and what you need to negotiate effectively. It's the x-factor in leadership, the quality that causes dogs to stop barking, the dishonest to froth, women to swoon, children to feel safe, young people to seek mentoring, customers to sign with enthusiasm, staff to be loyal, trades to do a bit extra, service workers to feel elevated, antagonists to cease their hostilities, and yes, employers to give due consideration to whether they have made their best offer. It was a funny aside in a valuable article, and self-deprecation is a peculiar UK/CAN thing, but I didn't get the impression the author knew enough to make a joke about it, and they should be more confident in the value and integrity they can provide, as they've done some really cool and fasctinating stuff and should own that.
- deleted 4y ago
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egman_ekki 4y ago
> company [···] gave me feedback that "if this was how you worked on a team, it'd be perfect, and we love it. But in an interview, that's not what we want" What a weird feedback. That sounds like a miscommunication that the interviewer would be responsible for.
- deleted 4y ago
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bambataa 4y ago
Interesting that the OP liked Monzo so much. I have heard consistently bad things about their tech culture.
- claytonjy 4y ago
  Yup, I only know about them from this site, where they seem to be held up as an example of taking a microservice architecture too far.
jhatemyjob 4y ago
My god. They are doing you DIRTY. 8 years of experience and only making 90k euros??? My first job out of college i was making $105k. OP should be making AT LEAST $400k by now. Reading his compensation history is making me depressed. What a waste of a career! I would take this page down and switch jobs ASAP. You could easily make 3x your current income. https://www.jvt.me/salary/ https://www.jvt.me/salary/
- id 4y ago
  There are senior developers making less than 30k euros in Europe. $400k is absolutely unheard of. Not even CTOs make that much!
  - jhatemyjob 4y ago
    I hope you're joking about the senior 30k euro salary. I'd switch careers entirely if I was making that little. My father makes double that driving a bus part time. If what you're saying is true, the european market is fucking abysmal.
    - chillel 4y ago
      yes it is. it really is.
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      No, he's not joking. In Eastern Europe, salaries are quite small.
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ensan 4y ago
Is it just me, or are the salaries much lower in UK than in US? Why?
- jamietanna 4y ago
  We don't have to pay for healthcare for one ;D Cost of living is generally lower AFAIK, too
  - kitten_mittens_ 4y ago
    I wonder what that looks like versus Purchasing Power Parity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) My salary in Germany (€60K) and apartment in a not great neighborhood was €900 a month. Here in the US, I pull $150K and spend ~3K a month on a studio. I think my standard of living in Germany (besides desperately missing air conditioning) was roughly the same.
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      I make about €48000 after taxes in Romania. And while the standards of living might be the same, it only matters while we are not competing for the same goods. You can afford a better car than me, better electronics, nicer trips in foreign countries, and so on since those kind of goods tend to have the same prices no matter where you live. Also, your savings means more.
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        >I make about €48000 after taxes in Romania Wow, that's insanely impressive. Can I ask how that's possible? I'm making that *BEFORE taxes, in Austria, Which nets me significantly less than you in take home pay and savings.
        DeathArrow 4y ago
        I have 15 years of experience and I know how to sell my services. It's kind of low wage for Austria. At my former working place, my colleagues from Germany made €5-6000 / month, at least.
cjvirtucio 4y ago
>Knowing that I had two offers, and that I had gone through a very long process with them and having received an offer, I knew that I was a candidate they'd like to hire. This is the perfect time to get that extra worth, as you hold a lot of the chips, especially with two offers. This has always been really hard for me to do, particularly if I actually am happy with the offer. It could be imposter syndrome, where I often feel like I don't "deserve" it.
- throwaquestion5 4y ago
  I would try to disassociate my work income from my personal worth as a worker. We always leave some money on the table, but can always do all the steps we can to reduce how much we are leaving on it. In case I have an offer that I'm actually happy with, personally I'm the opposite. I already reached my expected range, failing to negotiate for more doesn't worry me so I can do it more confidently, which may kind of help me in a way. Don't ask for too little tho, they may notice they can get you less than what you are asking by holding firm.
tacrolimus 4y ago
Just sent two-week notice last week. ~30 applications, 3 offers. I was interviewing with both tech and "non-tech" (software engineer/research role at traditional STEM companies). The stark difference is that for tech companies the track record carries little weight (me with 10+ years dev experience, proprietary and open-source), while in "non-tech" companies the decisions almost solely based on my experience (projects, publications, etc). For the latter all I needed to do is either give a presentation or a round of 1-1s chatting about my work. The tech company interviews gave me an impression of being replaceable: passing these tests then we'll welcome you as a screw of our well-oil machine. What gets me most is that I was still got asked behavior questions like "do you think you are a team player?". (I decided to be snarky on that FANNG interviewer and told her "I like being left alone". I was put off by the fact that she's wearing a mask in our 1-1 zoom meeting anyway).
- throwaway83242 4y ago
  >> I was put off by the fact that she's wearing a mask in our 1-1 zoom meeting anyway This is unfair. I was in the woman's shoes recently. Somone in her family may be having Covid!
  - tacrolimus 4y ago
    She's in the company office (glass doors/walls, people moving in the background, etc). From my view it seems I was on a projector.
    - throwaway83242 4y ago
      That explains why she is wearing a mask. Boss forced her to come to office and she is not comfortable coming in, yet!
type-r 4y ago
> "channel your inner middle-aged white man who'd feel entitled to ask for more". (Note that this is a statement said in jest, based on research that men are more likely to ask for raises, and doesn't have any racist undertones) Here's a heuristic I've found useful -- if you replace the race, age, or sex signifier and it ends up sounding racist, ageist, or sexist, turns out that your original statement is in fact also racist, ageist, or sexist. Frustrating inclusion in an otherwise interesting article.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- oh_sigh 4y ago
- jimmaswell 4y ago
  - caffeine 4y ago
    The difference between the dead comment and the article is the self-deprecation and the positive vs negative connotation. The flagged comment was saying something negative about a group. The original article was self deprecation (they don’t ask for enough) and complementary about the group it stereotypes (sticking up for oneself).
- jmcgough 4y ago
  It's not really the same thing when you're referring to a privileged group of people (punching up vs punching down).
  - tjs8rj 4y ago
    This gets said all the time but it’s just not applicable. Making fun of rich people is certainly punching up: by definition they’re rich and obviously very privileged, privileged enough to offset constant verbal abuse perhaps, we’d all be happy to trade places with them in a heart beat (take the “being rich” and mean comments - a great deal!). With being white it’s not so clear here. Being white doesn’t definitionally come with clear net privilege because it’s such a diverse group: your life is likely much better than some devestatingly poor white person in Appalachia, or even just the majority of white people if you work in tech. As a test for privilege, ask yourself: “would I trade places with a random white person and accept these racist comments”? Is that a “good deal” like with the rich person example? It’s not clear and probably not worth the risk you end up trading places with the many white people in crappier circumstances than you. That’s exactly the proof: many many white people don’t have so much privilege that you’d happily trade places and take all the racist comments too. In other words: it’s really NOT punching up in many many of the circumstances, many of the white readers who see your comment, it is just exactly punching down for them. Not that the above should even have to be argued, being racist isn’t ok even if it’s punching up, just as sexism against rich women isn’t ok, or homophobia targeting rich gay men. Jewish people are exceedingly successful as a group along dimensions like income and wealth, so it’d be “punching up” in some sense, but does that justify antisemetism? Of course not. Trying to justify racism with “it’s punching up” just comes across as “I want to be racist but don’t want to be seen as a racist”.
manuelabeledo 4y ago
It still fascinates me how this (IT) is the only industry that consistently relies on programming assessments to evaluate candidates. I don’t do these anymore. If they ask, I politely decline.
- mwint 4y ago
  What’s your experience been in doing that?
  - manuelabeledo 4y ago
    Interviewers react either dumbfounded or almost offended somehow. Most respond by telling me that this is their standard process and they cannot make exceptions, to which I reply that if they want to know if my code is kosher, they can either call any of my former managers, or check my GitHub out. It has worked out for me so far, though. Besides, why would I take a job as a senior software engineer, if their threshold to assess my skills is some college level assignment? It just doesn’t make any sense.
ghufran_syed 4y ago
I applaud everyone who makes their experience and salary public, I think it's super helpful. Based on that info, I am shocked that a "senior developer" with 5-6 years experience would get around 100k gbp total compensation, while in the bay area I personally know at least two people with this level of experience making around $250k usd. Seems hard to believe that immigration law, reluctance to immigrate and / or time zone difficulties are that significant so as to allow such a differential to exist without getting arbitraged away. What am I missing? Even if you assume that the UK jobs get 6 weeks vacation and the US (sf bay area) jobs get 2 weeks, that still only justifies around an 8% difference. And one of those two friends have "unlimited" vacation
- junk872 4y ago
  HN deludes people into thinking these multi six fig salaries are normal and the main thing stopping one earning it is one's choice not to be in a "hot spot". In reality it's not happening for 99% of is whether we are there or not
- maxfurman 4y ago
  Salaries in SF are so high because the cost of living is so out of sync with the rest of the country. I live like a king on 120k usd in Philly but would need roommates in the Bay
- bityard 4y ago
  > What am I missing? The cost of living in the bay area is basically the highest in the world. So after rent, taxes, and food, $250k there is more like $100k almost anywhere else in the country. The UK has single-player healthcare instead of the US system where nearly all health care dollars go to private companies incentivized to charge as much as the market will bear (how much would you pay to keep from dying?) PLUS a whole insurance industry sitting in the middle and taking an enormous slice of the pie. So healthcare costs in the US are a huge fraction of a US worker's paycheck, even if they are perfectly healthy. The US tech industry is famous for its 60-80 hour work weeks, especially among the FAANGs, and those companies are willing to pay high wages in exchange. And at the trailing edge, it's just a different culture and job market all around.

194 points by edent 4y ago

> "Senior" is a title with a different meaning everywhere And so is meaningless. Can we just get rid of this "I am a senior" nonsense? Also "I am a junior", come to that.

ThalesX 4y ago
Whenever I interview I present myself as a developer with more than a decade of experience that wants $X / year and willing to go a bit lower for the right company. Whatever other categorizations they might have for me, is on the company. Ultimately I don’t really care.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  Well, ditto. The most meaningless job title I ever wound up with was "Senior Systems Architect" - really only something they could put on my business cards so they could sell me for consultancy gigs. Bah! It's not what they call you, it's what they pay you - call by reference versus call by value, I guess.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    >The most meaningless job title I ever wound up with was "Senior Systems Architect" hah, when I was employed by the Danish under ministry in charge of standardization (called IT og Telestyrelsen at that time) management people came through one day and asked what titles we wanted, and for various amusing reasons another guy and I said we want to be called "XML Architects". They gave us business cards too!
  - mmmpop 4y ago
    > It's not what they call you, it's what they pay you This is correct because if I'm writing checks, the one making the most is generally my "senior" person. I suppose this doesn't scale well though, especially when you start talking about niche skillsets where being objectively "good" gets conflated with "useful at the moment."
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  >Whenever I interview I present myself as a developer with more than a decade of experience that wants $X / year and willing to go a bit lower for the right company I present myself as someone with plenty of experience in both writing code and software architecture. Someone they direly need and will help their business achieve its goals for at least X amount of money. Which would be a great deal for them even if it doesn't sound cheap in the beginning. Many told me it's too much. But a few have said yes. You should think about the largest amount you think you can obtain. And add 15 - 20 % on top. You will be surprised in finding that someone will say yes.
alostpuppy 4y ago
Yes please.
simplehuman 4y ago
What should one replace it with?
- zabzonk 4y ago
  You don't need a replacement - you don't need it in the first place.
lbriner 4y ago
That was the point that jumped out to me as well. If we can all start making progression ladders a normal part of a dev team then we recruit for a rung on the ladder rather than an arbitrary title. Then us Devs will be less precious about "That person said I wasn't a Senior", instead we can try and convince our prospective employer that we can e.g. "Consistently produce high quality code", "Is a thought-leader in new frameworks etc." It also allows conversations about salary to be more open since we pay a range for a specific level and not a massive range of 20-100K depending on how good somebody interviews or how much gall they have asking for more than they deserve! see https://www.progression.fyi/ https://www.progression.fyi/
wintermutestwin 4y ago
? I found the label to be highly useful as an adjective descriptor. At the highest level it is a way to distinguish between Intelligence and Wisdom. Wisdom requires experience, but experience doesn't indicate Wisdom. A senior role has to be someone who can mentor junior roles and has fairly well developed soft skills. I can put a senior in front of a customer. When choosing between two candidates for a senior role: Candidate A has: Int 16 Wis 10 Candidate B has: Int 14 Wis 12 I would almost always choose Candidate B.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  And you evaluate Int and Wis scores ... how?
  - wintermutestwin 4y ago
    It was a D&D reference. I figured any geek would grok it. I was just making the point that intelligence alone does not make a good hire for a senior position. Of course the specific methods of evaluation are complex, but I would argue that it is easier to evaluate wisdom by asking experiential questions.
    - zabzonk 4y ago
      > I figured any geek would grok it. I did. I simply don't understand how such scores can be evaluated in real life.
sdevonoes 4y ago
Yes, it's meaningless among developers, but not among recruiters. Since I work first and foremost in exchange for money, I make it pretty clear to recruiters that I am "a very senior software architect with knowledge in X, Y and what not under my belt"... and so, I get more offers and got more money when negotiating an offer. Among my colleagues, or when someone (not a recruiter) asks me what I do for a living, I say: I'm a computer programmer.
throwaway_1928 4y ago
I believe "Senior" in tech interviews only means: * been around longer and more subject to ageism * more system design questions
DeathArrow 4y ago
We can replace senior with guru or master. Or ninja.

lelandfe 4y ago

Interesting how different our job market experiences were. First, only 8 applications! That’s fantastic - I likewise am starting a senior software eng role… but after 6 months of unemployed full time interviewing, and around 80 applications. FE, not BE, though. In terms of content, I think every coding round required time/space complexity analysis, and (as an FE!) most had me doing things like building recursive binary tree checkers, solving medium Leetcode problems, etc. > I made a point of challenging it and asking whether it was representative of the role Yes! Love this. I had a systems design round, which are usually my time to shine, that focused exclusively on designing an app’s database. A DBA I am not, and I essentially flunked. I brought it up to their CTO on a later call, as I really didn’t think that was a fair assessment of me. That wound up being the place that hired me :)

pranit10 4y ago
Good to see I am not the only one interviewing a ton. I have a different experience than yours for FE interviews. No leetcode questions. Mostly take home or live coding React/Vanilla JS stuff. No system design rounds either mostly talking about the tech stack in breadth and sometimes in-depth.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  You guys are not alone. My last job search was probably on the order of 100 applications, 10 interviews, 1 offer. It's been this way my whole 20+ year career. I don't know who these Captains Of Industry geniuses are who are getting multiple offers from 20 job applications, but I'm sure it's not the norm.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - tester756 4y ago
    is this some US thing? here in Eastern EU if you have >= 3 years of xp then probably almost all of companies that are hiring will try to talk to you if you apply ofc if your skills/tech matches their requirements somewhat reasonably

nijave 4y ago

I've always found system design interviews to be a bit... weird. Designing a complex system generally takes at least a few days (at smaller places) up to weeks or months at larger places. In addition, the solutions always seem to be biased towards solutions that fit with existing technology/knowledge (which is good). It's not very easy to encapsulate domain knowledge and research heavy questions into a small interview slot so some of these can feel quite contrived.

golergka 4y ago
> Designing a complex system generally takes at least a few days (at smaller places) up to weeks or months at larger places That's designing it completely. In the interview, you're not expected to produce the final result; more importantly, it's not even about the result, but about the thought process and conversation.
- spyspy 4y ago
  Please. I’ve been asked why I didn’t use specific features of kafka in my solution and “because I’ve never used it before only these other pubsub systems” was not the right answer.
  - golergka 4y ago
    The fact that somebody found a way to misuse a tool (system design interview) doesn't mean that there's something wrong with the tool itself.
  - simplehuman 4y ago
    That anecdote only means the interviewer was bad
    - yunohn 4y ago
      The point is that the open ended question of system design can lead to nonsensical expectations - No True /Interviewer/ fallacy or not.

polote 4y ago

It always baffles me that companies which struggle hiring, can take the decision to reject a candidate like him during the screening process ...

lloydatkinson 4y ago
Reminds me of this https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
This is way more common than you think and it seems like it's a tragedy of the commons. Companies struggle to hire, yet have crazy demands and interview practices that filter out good candidates with potential, because they're looking for the 'perfect candidate', whatever that means to them. From my experience, the whole shortage in this industry is mostly companies being too picky, because they're afraid of the small chance of letting in a less ideal candidate. And I'm not even talking about unicorns/FAANGs/big-tech, but regular companies.
- ushakov 4y ago
  yeah but we need to pretend there’s a shortage, so we can import cheap slave-like labour from third-world countries
  - scarface74 4y ago
    There is nothing “cheap” about how much companies pay most H1Bs compared to the average salary in the US. Now the policies and regulations around how they are treated is a different story.
lbriner 4y ago
What is baffling? OP explains that they didn't have certain things on their CV. If I was hiring for a JS app and the applicant was all Java or .Net, it is no disrespect to them to filter them out at the CV stage. I can only speak for myself but as a Dev of 20 years, mainly in .Net (but with Java, Obj-C, PHP and JS experience) I wouldn't dream of applying for a JS job because despite the trope, it is not easy for a Senior to switch languages and just pick it up.

deleted 4y ago

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throwaway4good 4y ago

Nice to see the openness about salary. The numbers he quotes (90 uk pounds for remote work) - is that normal for the UK atm?

jamietanna 4y ago
Not particularly - in London, or with a lot of high-funding startups it's more common, but across the country no. Makes it much harder for local companies to try and compete, even if they're very big. If you see my salary changes over the last year, it's a considerable jump. Either way, I'm aware I'm gonna be working quite a bit for it :D
- throwaway4good 4y ago
  Congrats on it. It is apparently a statistical fact that keeping salaries hidden and or confidential causes lower salaries. So what you do here is applauded in our current world of high inflation and record corporate profits.
  - jamietanna 4y ago
    Thanks. Yeah that's why my salaries/compensation detail are all public, so I can try and help nudge the needle a bit towards at least having ranges available everywhere.
- wirthjason 4y ago
  A comment on the CV. At quick glance it looked like you only worked at places for a year or two then changed. This is generally a red flag for me. But because I saw the salary history I knew there was a Lon time at Capital One. However this was harder to spot on the resume. It might be better to group your experience at a single employer together so your loyalty stands out. I’m curious if employers ever saw your salary posts and responded.
rjh29 4y ago
It seems highly variable, I have friends on 110k+ with huge bonuses, I also have friends on 30k. 90k is very high for a fully-remote job IMO.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

>Time consuming >The only company that gave me any compensation for the interview process was GitPod >Another thing to note is that I ended up not really preparing for the interviews. I feel like this is a bit of an arrogant move by me And that's how they get you. You invest into what's essentially a second full time job, without any guaranteed compensation, yet somehow you feel you yourself are the arrogant one for not doing more. That's not even highlighting all the other emotional effects the process had on the author, and the author is by no means "average" in their methodology. Let's push back against this, please.

golergka 4y ago
Doesn't the company invest significant amount of money in the process too?
- diatone 4y ago
  Does “the company” need to sleep?
  - golergka 4y ago
    The company is built by investment from VCs from hedge funds from 401k or pensions of real people who not only need to sleep, but on average make less then senior software engineers.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Wouldn't that be more reason to push back against this? There's an implicit assumption that more sessions -> more security. I've yet to find evidence this session inflation is doing anything beyond making companies feel more secure. Same goes for a lot of other things related to interviewing. If there's no clear evidence, it should be treated as the bread and circuses it is.
  - spyspy 4y ago
    I’ve found that the more people you throw at a candidate the higher the chances that _someone_ is going to find _something_ they don’t like about him/her and burn them in the end, especially when approvals have to be unanimous. I’ve seen engineers give glowing praise for one particular candidate but they got passed on because they made some comment about disliking scrum/agile/jira and that just rubbed the 2nd project manager they interviewed with the wrong way.

durnygbur 4y ago

hahaha booking.com, I got rejected after screening call.. they must be swarmed with geniuses, or they are probing the market for current salaries, or they're looking for someone ready to relocate to Amsterdam for 65k EUR. What an enigma.

fullstackchris 4y ago

> This other company, however, gave me feedback that "if this was how you worked on a team, it'd be perfect, and we love it. But in an interview, that's not what we want" The tech interview process is still so completely broken in my book. Nobody really knows what anybody wants or how to show it 1 hour blocks (for both parties - applicant and employer)

evandale 4y ago
It's such baffling feedback. I can't even comprehend what it's supposed to mean or why someone would say it. Are they trying to look for a rock-star interviewer who is a total disaster for the team?
- marcinzm 4y ago
  It's possible they had a rubric for the interview which implicitly assumed a certain way of answering. Since the whole point in that case is to strictly follow the rubric to lower bias they had to reject.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- akhmatova 4y ago
  Are they trying to look for a rock-star interviewer who is a total disaster for the team? That's one interpretation. Another is that they're scared shitless and have no idea how to go about this other than to cargo-cult as many filter questions they can from other people's process, and then, well, see what happens. Or both.
deleted 4y ago
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draw_down 4y ago

If you need to go through the “mediocre white male” rigamarole to justify to yourself a better wage, so be it. This MWM is happy for you. I’d maybe go with something more like “I’m worth it” or “having confidence in myself is a good thing on its own” but again, whatever works.

mgaunard 4y ago

There are two types of interview processes: 1) get tested with irrelevant general-purpose problem-solving questions before knowing what the role and team are, 2) get presented the opportunity and assess fitness before doing relevant technical challenges. As a candidate you only want to spend time on 2), not 1). As a company 1) is convenient because it ensures people are somewhat decent before you bother your hardworking engineers.

dotBen 4y ago
(former hiring manager here) depends on seniority of role and candidate. If you are interviewing for an Eng I or Eng II role (or even more junior, if the company does that) at a large tech company you are likely going to get a 'blind interview' (where its yet to be decided which project you will work on) and then if you are successful, assigned a team based on need within the organization. It's the reality of how large organizations keep their teams stable with employee turnover and also slightly grow them. Yes, teams will work to fill their roles directly too but often the team will show up for work on a Monday morning to find that they have a new member of their team who they've never met but is an 'extra bonus' or the headcount has been filled anyway. If you are likely to be interviewing for Eng I/II you should not be surprised if parent's option 1) is the route you are presented with - I think it's wrong to say "you only want to spend time on 2)" as it's unrealistic for early career folks and they risk missing out on exceptional opportunities to get a foot in the door.
- mgaunard 4y ago
  I'd say there are many more advantages to working for a small rather than large organization. Those would be most likely to take a tailored approach to hiring even for juniors. Though of course you should do a bit of large ones as well to see what it's like and put it on your CV.
  - angarg12 4y ago
    Sadly many small companies don't have the means to support juniors. Some don't hire them at all. For the folks out there, the easiest way to join FAANG is as a new grad. Whether you want to do it or not is your decision to make.

tomxor 4y ago

> then in the coding exercises you were asked what the O(n) complexity of time/space were I usually ask people to roughly describe what is meant by computational complexity (sometimes I slot it into the conversation when discussing some code they wrote), or what big O notation is for... assuring them I'm not looking for a formal definition but an understanding and applicability. I probably wouldn't do a great job actually using big O notation to express complexity myself if asked on the spot; however I believe a basic understanding of the underlying concept is invaluable and separates juniors from everyone else. Is this not considered reasonable these days? [edit] To clarify, I think the author was being asked to express their code in big O, I'm just wondering what people think about ask about big O and complexity in general.

semiquaver 4y ago
There’s been a move away from requirements for CS degrees in software development over the last decade or so, but that shouldn’t mean that key concepts like asymptomatic complexity are not needed, only that they are sometimes understood at a more intuitive and less academic level. The author is a senior engineer, I have no doubt that they could describe difference between a linear and polynomial-time algorithm and the potential concerns with the latter even if they might not use that terminology because of a trend against academic-sounding lingo.
returningfory2 4y ago
> Is this not considered reasonable these days? There's currently a backlash against LeetCode style interviews, and I think one part of this backlash is that dismissing anything that feels LeetCodey (like asking about time complexity) is considered reasonable.
- twofornone 4y ago
  I abhor everything leetcode (and suck at their puzzles), but I would call O(n) basic foundational theory. Competence in engineering requires an intuitive understanding of at least time complexity. Given that this is software "engineering", it's probably fine if the candidate isn't familiar with big O specifically but they should at least be able to reason about scaling complexity on an interview, I think.

mattbee 4y ago

Well done on landing the position but I wouldn't expect your transparency to be reciprocated from Deliveroo. I tipped a driver £15 through the app the other day, he turns up and thanks me for the £7.50. Shows me his end of the transaction: Tip, £7.50. I was so embarrassed I ran to find a fiver. I guess watch your contract and payslip eh.

1970-01-01 4y ago

Hunt often! If you aren't in love with your current job, just keep looking. A good pace is to apply (to more interesting and overall better jobs) every month.

daniaal 4y ago

Did you have to solve a leetcode problem for the deliveroo interview?

jamietanna 4y ago
Nope, it was a different test
- daniaal 4y ago
  Thanks :)

DeathArrow 4y ago

>Firstly, I'm really glad to say that the interviews I did were not the stereotypical tech interviews. As an industry, it's great to see we're getting better, and moving away from whiteboard coding, dealing with super abstract problems like inverting a binary tree, or doing things that we'd generally just use a Search Engine for in our real jobs. I would expect a junior developer out of college knows data structures and algorithms. That includes knowing what a binary tree is. And if you know what a binary tree is, it isn't terribly difficult to invert it. Why shouldn't a "senior" developer know what a binary tree is? While I don't have much regard for leetcode and hackerrank, I wouldn't want to hire someone who doesn't know about algorithms and data structures and thinks he can solve anything with Google. Sure, many thinks are solvable using Google, but many require knowledge, experience and practice. >Unfortunately one company - who outsourced the first part of their interview process - had something similar to this, which I wasn't impressed with. There were some arbitrary questions around several topics, and then in the coding exercises you were asked what the O(n) complexity of time/space were. The author is even outraged he was asked about time complexity, something even junior programmers shouldn't have a with.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I don’t like the “trick” questions where you have to think of some very specific approach or else you fail. But I agree that basic knowledge of things like trees and runtime complexity is reasonable. That kind of stuff does come up in actual work.
avereveard 4y ago
Memorizing stuff that any reference book can tell you is a waste of time and skill. Knowing when to use a binary tree is much more important. Knowing not to write a binary tree and using a library is a delivery saving skill. At least abstract problems off a whiteboard show candidate problem solving approaches. But dry coding koans are absolutely a waste of time for anyone involved and tend to produce teams that care about knowledge tidbits hoarding instead of, idk, serving the business that pays them producing value. And rest assured, there is no value in writing a binary tree for the business. As a matter of fact if one of my dev doesn't use off the shelf components for these kind of things they'd get a stern talking about time efficiency, security and the likes. Why would I go and stress that at a interview?

germinalphrase 4y ago

There is a lot of questioning and helpful back-and-forth in this thread, so I’ll toss myself in: I have been working as a high school English teacher since 2012. Without a doubt, large parts of this job reinforce and feed my core values. I am acutely aware that my job, and the relationships that I develop, matter in a meaningful way; however, my engagement with the job has shifted over the last three or four years, and I recognize that it is time for me to step away from the classroom. I am not jaded, burned out, or coasting on my commitments. I am merely looking for the next door to open come June. If anyone is willing to connect about UX/UXR, Product Management - my email is in profile.

sdevonoes 4y ago

> Another thing to note is that I ended up not really preparing for the interviews. I feel like this is a bit of an arrogant move by me Well written article. The only part I don't agree with is this though. If I am applying to a company, I do research what the company (and its product) is about. But that's it. I want to know if in my current "shape" and with my current knowledge, I would be a good fit for them. For me, preparing for days or weeks for a tech interview feels like cheating: "Recruiter: design a distributed key-value store. Me thinking: yes! I read how to do that in How to Crack the Coding interview! I'm gonna nail it!... Recruiter after seeing my solution: Wow, let's hire this guy!"

Deltitt 4y ago
Yes and everyone is doing it and everyone who is doi.g it is earning 10k more or perhaps even 50k and more just because they do that. They are not better at the job than you are (at least this alone is not an indication) but they still get hired over the other group of people. So I do prepare for my interviews. I'm increasing my chances. And btw I learn things when preparing for an interview so while I don't like it, I still learn.
- sdevonoes 4y ago
  That's very well. I didn't pretend to say I am doing it right, and others not. > And btw I learn things when preparing for an interview so while I don't like it, I still learn. Well, I'm constantly learning whether or not I'm looking for a job.
  - Deltitt 4y ago
    Yes same as me. But when they want to see I can write a handful of algorithms blind, I'm learning as well just something else than usual.
bradlys 4y ago
This is the modern interview practice though. Realistically - you’re not gonna pass at most of the companies here in SV when you’re getting leetcode hards on the regular like I am. Without a lot of practice, you’re gonna fail spectacularly.

dominotw 4y ago

i've been doing this last 1 month too. Its a bizzaro world out there. 1. long application forms that takes a long time to fill with no response or acknowledgment after. eg: https://automattic.com/work-with-us/ https://automattic.com/work-with-us/ 2. recruiters who insist on scheduling on phone call when it can just be an email/text. 3. endless rounds or interviews with all sorts of weird stuff, 1. Take home assignments 2. hackerrank puzzles 3. pair programming on 'real world' problem 4. Open a PR to Open source repo 5. leetcode puzzles with stuff like dynamic programming. with 2 mediums/ 1 hr speed. 6. 'system design' interviews url shorterner with caching/replication/sharding/consistent hashing 7. 'behavior interview' .pre made answers to what was your biggest mistake. how do you resolve confilict with teammates. 8. Debugging sessions to find bugs in existing code. 9. 'real world case study', 1 hr presentation of challenging problem you've solved in ur career. 10. 1 hr 'life story' interview where you showcase your passion for work and life. 11. product design interviews. how will you improve our shitty product.

DeathArrow 4y ago
It seems to me you have applied to a diverse group of positions. For the same kind of roles, there is some diversity but interviews tend to be more alike.
akhmatova 4y ago
Recruiters who insist on scheduling on phone call when it can just be an email/text. Or a video call when a regular phone (or voice-only zoom) would be much easier and quicker on both sides. Endless rounds or interviews with all sorts of weird stuff As if expressly designed to indicate just how worthless your time is, in their view. Its a bizzaro world out there. Yep - it's enough to make you say "F-it, just give me a CRUD job with a boss who isn't an outright asshole".

motohagiography 4y ago

> I thought back to something a friend of mine says, "channel your inner middle-aged white man who'd feel entitled to ask for more". (Note that this is a statement said in jest, based on research that men are more likely to ask for raises, and doesn't have any racist undertones) While I take the joke and sentiment at face value, as a member of said demographic, the word I think they were looking for is "dignity," and while it's a rare quality nobody has a monopoly on, it is precisely the value that institutions try to grind out of you, and what you need to negotiate effectively. It's the x-factor in leadership, the quality that causes dogs to stop barking, the dishonest to froth, women to swoon, children to feel safe, young people to seek mentoring, customers to sign with enthusiasm, staff to be loyal, trades to do a bit extra, service workers to feel elevated, antagonists to cease their hostilities, and yes, employers to give due consideration to whether they have made their best offer. It was a funny aside in a valuable article, and self-deprecation is a peculiar UK/CAN thing, but I didn't get the impression the author knew enough to make a joke about it, and they should be more confident in the value and integrity they can provide, as they've done some really cool and fasctinating stuff and should own that.

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egman_ekki 4y ago

> company [···] gave me feedback that "if this was how you worked on a team, it'd be perfect, and we love it. But in an interview, that's not what we want" What a weird feedback. That sounds like a miscommunication that the interviewer would be responsible for.

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bambataa 4y ago

Interesting that the OP liked Monzo so much. I have heard consistently bad things about their tech culture.

claytonjy 4y ago
Yup, I only know about them from this site, where they seem to be held up as an example of taking a microservice architecture too far.

jhatemyjob 4y ago

My god. They are doing you DIRTY. 8 years of experience and only making 90k euros??? My first job out of college i was making $105k. OP should be making AT LEAST $400k by now. Reading his compensation history is making me depressed. What a waste of a career! I would take this page down and switch jobs ASAP. You could easily make 3x your current income. https://www.jvt.me/salary/ https://www.jvt.me/salary/

id 4y ago
There are senior developers making less than 30k euros in Europe. $400k is absolutely unheard of. Not even CTOs make that much!
- jhatemyjob 4y ago
  I hope you're joking about the senior 30k euro salary. I'd switch careers entirely if I was making that little. My father makes double that driving a bus part time. If what you're saying is true, the european market is fucking abysmal.
  - chillel 4y ago
    yes it is. it really is.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    No, he's not joking. In Eastern Europe, salaries are quite small.
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ensan 4y ago

Is it just me, or are the salaries much lower in UK than in US? Why?

jamietanna 4y ago
We don't have to pay for healthcare for one ;D Cost of living is generally lower AFAIK, too
- kitten_mittens_ 4y ago
  I wonder what that looks like versus Purchasing Power Parity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) My salary in Germany (€60K) and apartment in a not great neighborhood was €900 a month. Here in the US, I pull $150K and spend ~3K a month on a studio. I think my standard of living in Germany (besides desperately missing air conditioning) was roughly the same.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    I make about €48000 after taxes in Romania. And while the standards of living might be the same, it only matters while we are not competing for the same goods. You can afford a better car than me, better electronics, nicer trips in foreign countries, and so on since those kind of goods tend to have the same prices no matter where you live. Also, your savings means more.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      >I make about €48000 after taxes in Romania Wow, that's insanely impressive. Can I ask how that's possible? I'm making that *BEFORE taxes, in Austria, Which nets me significantly less than you in take home pay and savings.
      - DeathArrow 4y ago
        I have 15 years of experience and I know how to sell my services. It's kind of low wage for Austria. At my former working place, my colleagues from Germany made €5-6000 / month, at least.

cjvirtucio 4y ago

>Knowing that I had two offers, and that I had gone through a very long process with them and having received an offer, I knew that I was a candidate they'd like to hire. This is the perfect time to get that extra worth, as you hold a lot of the chips, especially with two offers. This has always been really hard for me to do, particularly if I actually am happy with the offer. It could be imposter syndrome, where I often feel like I don't "deserve" it.

throwaquestion5 4y ago
I would try to disassociate my work income from my personal worth as a worker. We always leave some money on the table, but can always do all the steps we can to reduce how much we are leaving on it. In case I have an offer that I'm actually happy with, personally I'm the opposite. I already reached my expected range, failing to negotiate for more doesn't worry me so I can do it more confidently, which may kind of help me in a way. Don't ask for too little tho, they may notice they can get you less than what you are asking by holding firm.

tacrolimus 4y ago

Just sent two-week notice last week. ~30 applications, 3 offers. I was interviewing with both tech and "non-tech" (software engineer/research role at traditional STEM companies). The stark difference is that for tech companies the track record carries little weight (me with 10+ years dev experience, proprietary and open-source), while in "non-tech" companies the decisions almost solely based on my experience (projects, publications, etc). For the latter all I needed to do is either give a presentation or a round of 1-1s chatting about my work. The tech company interviews gave me an impression of being replaceable: passing these tests then we'll welcome you as a screw of our well-oil machine. What gets me most is that I was still got asked behavior questions like "do you think you are a team player?". (I decided to be snarky on that FANNG interviewer and told her "I like being left alone". I was put off by the fact that she's wearing a mask in our 1-1 zoom meeting anyway).

throwaway83242 4y ago
>> I was put off by the fact that she's wearing a mask in our 1-1 zoom meeting anyway This is unfair. I was in the woman's shoes recently. Somone in her family may be having Covid!
- tacrolimus 4y ago
  She's in the company office (glass doors/walls, people moving in the background, etc). From my view it seems I was on a projector.
  - throwaway83242 4y ago
    That explains why she is wearing a mask. Boss forced her to come to office and she is not comfortable coming in, yet!

type-r 4y ago

> "channel your inner middle-aged white man who'd feel entitled to ask for more". (Note that this is a statement said in jest, based on research that men are more likely to ask for raises, and doesn't have any racist undertones) Here's a heuristic I've found useful -- if you replace the race, age, or sex signifier and it ends up sounding racist, ageist, or sexist, turns out that your original statement is in fact also racist, ageist, or sexist. Frustrating inclusion in an otherwise interesting article.

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oh_sigh 4y ago
jimmaswell 4y ago
- caffeine 4y ago
  The difference between the dead comment and the article is the self-deprecation and the positive vs negative connotation. The flagged comment was saying something negative about a group. The original article was self deprecation (they don’t ask for enough) and complementary about the group it stereotypes (sticking up for oneself).
jmcgough 4y ago
It's not really the same thing when you're referring to a privileged group of people (punching up vs punching down).
- tjs8rj 4y ago
  This gets said all the time but it’s just not applicable. Making fun of rich people is certainly punching up: by definition they’re rich and obviously very privileged, privileged enough to offset constant verbal abuse perhaps, we’d all be happy to trade places with them in a heart beat (take the “being rich” and mean comments - a great deal!). With being white it’s not so clear here. Being white doesn’t definitionally come with clear net privilege because it’s such a diverse group: your life is likely much better than some devestatingly poor white person in Appalachia, or even just the majority of white people if you work in tech. As a test for privilege, ask yourself: “would I trade places with a random white person and accept these racist comments”? Is that a “good deal” like with the rich person example? It’s not clear and probably not worth the risk you end up trading places with the many white people in crappier circumstances than you. That’s exactly the proof: many many white people don’t have so much privilege that you’d happily trade places and take all the racist comments too. In other words: it’s really NOT punching up in many many of the circumstances, many of the white readers who see your comment, it is just exactly punching down for them. Not that the above should even have to be argued, being racist isn’t ok even if it’s punching up, just as sexism against rich women isn’t ok, or homophobia targeting rich gay men. Jewish people are exceedingly successful as a group along dimensions like income and wealth, so it’d be “punching up” in some sense, but does that justify antisemetism? Of course not. Trying to justify racism with “it’s punching up” just comes across as “I want to be racist but don’t want to be seen as a racist”.

manuelabeledo 4y ago

It still fascinates me how this (IT) is the only industry that consistently relies on programming assessments to evaluate candidates. I don’t do these anymore. If they ask, I politely decline.

mwint 4y ago
What’s your experience been in doing that?
- manuelabeledo 4y ago
  Interviewers react either dumbfounded or almost offended somehow. Most respond by telling me that this is their standard process and they cannot make exceptions, to which I reply that if they want to know if my code is kosher, they can either call any of my former managers, or check my GitHub out. It has worked out for me so far, though. Besides, why would I take a job as a senior software engineer, if their threshold to assess my skills is some college level assignment? It just doesn’t make any sense.

ghufran_syed 4y ago

I applaud everyone who makes their experience and salary public, I think it's super helpful. Based on that info, I am shocked that a "senior developer" with 5-6 years experience would get around 100k gbp total compensation, while in the bay area I personally know at least two people with this level of experience making around $250k usd. Seems hard to believe that immigration law, reluctance to immigrate and / or time zone difficulties are that significant so as to allow such a differential to exist without getting arbitraged away. What am I missing? Even if you assume that the UK jobs get 6 weeks vacation and the US (sf bay area) jobs get 2 weeks, that still only justifies around an 8% difference. And one of those two friends have "unlimited" vacation

junk872 4y ago
HN deludes people into thinking these multi six fig salaries are normal and the main thing stopping one earning it is one's choice not to be in a "hot spot". In reality it's not happening for 99% of is whether we are there or not
maxfurman 4y ago
Salaries in SF are so high because the cost of living is so out of sync with the rest of the country. I live like a king on 120k usd in Philly but would need roommates in the Bay
bityard 4y ago
> What am I missing? The cost of living in the bay area is basically the highest in the world. So after rent, taxes, and food, $250k there is more like $100k almost anywhere else in the country. The UK has single-player healthcare instead of the US system where nearly all health care dollars go to private companies incentivized to charge as much as the market will bear (how much would you pay to keep from dying?) PLUS a whole insurance industry sitting in the middle and taking an enormous slice of the pie. So healthcare costs in the US are a huge fraction of a US worker's paycheck, even if they are perfectly healthy. The US tech industry is famous for its 60-80 hour work weeks, especially among the FAANGs, and those companies are willing to pay high wages in exchange. And at the trailing edge, it's just a different culture and job market all around.