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Job Hunting in 2022

tinyhouse 4y ago
Thanks for sharing. Congrats to the author. 11 offers is amazing I doubt one can get so many in today's market but the good thing is you dont really need so many, 1 good one is enough. Ideally you have 2 so that you can nagotiate more easily.
- mhlakhani 4y ago
  thanks! I agree that you don't need this many offers - I took the time to interview at more places since I wanted to explore what was out there. Wouldn't recommend interviewing this heavily.
WoodenChair 4y ago
I wrote a similar post but my search was in May instead of at the end of the year: https://www.observationalhazard.com/2022/05/my-experience-with-technical-interviews_36.html https://www.observationalhazard.com/2022/05/my-experience-wi...
- avmich 4y ago
  I wonder, if somebody has not a happy story, but an ongoing story of failures in job search - would he write such a story? Or we hear only from those who succeeds? Or, assuming that everybody eventually succeeds, those who take years to find a position won't write about it, as they are too exhausted or embarrassed?
  - mhlakhani 4y ago
    I've heard / read stories from people who tried really hard and failed to find jobs (both within tech, but unfortunately more common outside of tech). Unfortunately they don't get as much traction as people prefer to hear stories with a happy ending
  - ergonaught 4y ago
    7 months deep, hundreds of applications, blah blah, so to answer your question, for the most part people in this particular situation don't write public stories about it. 1) It can feel like it will sabotage your chances even if it raises awareness of your situation. Firstly because you cannot help but "call out" some of the hiring practices/people, and secondly because, well, must be something wrong with you if no one is snapping you up, right? Which leads into... 2) A lot of really obnoxious folks like to pounce on this and "blame the victim", and then reference stuff like this post to show how "it must be your fault", etc, and "ain't nobody got time for that". It's hard enough to deal with impostor syndrome kicking the brains in without inviting the mob to kick as well. 3) It's depressing to think about it, much less to write all that down where it becomes an objective thing that cannot be ignored. Especially if you've tracked everything in detail (I have). Much more pleasant to sell off your belongings and pretend you're just embracing minimalism and forget about it. 4) Feels a lot like begging, and there are many complicated reasons why people mostly don't like to do that.
  - bradlys 4y ago
    People write them - they just don't gain traction. You also don't tend to write them with your name attached because that literally throws your own name down the drain. People are also not interested in hearing troubling stories because everyone has a troubling story. They want to hear how you succeeded because they want to emulate that success. They want to learn the "one small trick" that will lead them to finally getting the job of their dreams.
  - rsaarsoo 4y ago
    If you ask for it... I've been hunting for a job for more than a year now. Well, perhaps not hunting as I haven't sent out nearly as much resumes during that time as the author of this story. Though when I do apply, I usually also get to an interview. The interviewing causes a lot of stress to me. Even though I have never failed a coding interview, I utterly hate doing these. (Thankfully I've never had any hard leetcode problems thrown at me - I would have failed miserably.) I have also been a lot on the other side of the table, though I found even that to be a big source of stress to me. I personally believe these coding tasks are only good for filtering out the bad candidates - you can't use them to find great candidates. The last big company I worked at gradually steered towards harder and harder coding problems, until one day I just pulled out of the interviewing process as I felt that I personally would no more get hired. I wish more companies would be more flexible in their interviewing process. Like, I have several open source projects which mostly revolve around various forms of static code analysis - why do I need to prove that I can write fizzbuzz? Recently I had a pretty nice coding interview where the main task was not about me writing code, but instead reading the code that a junior developer had written and helping him sort out why the code doesn't work and how to improve it. This was the most real-work-like task I've experienced, I even found myself enjoying it. Most of the rejections I've had have been along the lines of: "While we find your technical skills excellent, you don't really look that motivated / we think we might not have the right kind of challenge for you." So, I'm in a bit of a dilemma. If I would strive to send out more resumes, most of these jobs are likely something that I'm not overly excited about, and so I will get rejected because I don't look committed enough. But if I try to look for a dream job, then that will likely never happen. I feel like I'm doomed either way. During this whole job search I did get one offer, but I rejected it, as I heard rumors about the owners of the company being complete assholes. (Like monitoring workers through security cameras to make sure they're working at their desks.) Thankfully I've had enough savings from my previous employments and I tend to live a fairly cheap life. Nevertheless, my savings are starting to run low now, which adds pressure to finally find a job. Well, I still have the option of selling my second house (so I'm still far from being financially ruined).
sbuccini 4y ago
Thanks to the author for taking the time to write this up. I think it is a fairly realistic description of what the process is like for an engineer who has spent several years working in Silicon Valley at a well-known company. The key takeaways, coming from someone with a similar background: * Rely heavily on your personal network to both identify worthwhile opportunities and for referrals which, in the Before Times, pretty much guaranteed an interview * It's worth thinking through what type of job would make you happy _before_ you get an exploding offer * They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight. It's a grind, but you definitely get "in the zone". Additionally, setting this goal ensures that you are being properly proactive/aggressive in pursuing opportunities. * You will probably see a design interview at any FAANG or hot startup. The classic one I've seen like 5 times is "how would you design a social media feed?" I still do not know the "correct" answer to this question. I don't have hard evidence for this but it seems that the demand is still very strong for experienced engineering managers. I am curious to hear if the author interviewed for SWE positions or engineering manager positions have they have filled both roles in the past.
- mhlakhani 4y ago
  author here - glad to see this post on HN, and glad you liked it! re: your last question - I interviewed for both SWE and EM positions, depending on what was available at any given company. At companies that had both roles open, I talked to folks to understand what they expected out of EMs vs engineers, as it varied a lot - and then I picked whatever was more appealing to me. In aggregate I went for 70% SWE / 30% EM roles (roughly)
  - veqq 4y ago
    > what they expected out of EMs vs engineers, as it varied a lot I'm curious about the rough models which exist.
    - ketzo 4y ago
      One of the most basic is “do your managers write code?” My first company out of college actually banned it as a practice - EMs were not allowed to be active contributors. I know at some companies, it’s actually a requirement, or at least heavily encouraged, for a manager to spend at least 20% time writing code. And then some places are a mixed bag. I can see both arguments! Just good to know that a company has a coherent philosophy on the issue.
asadlionpk 4y ago
Sounds about expected even in current conditions. If you are fairly skilled programmer, somewhat senior. These layoffs don’t matter. I assure you that you won’t die of hunger if you quit/are laid off. Plenty of demand for non-coasters.
- askafriend 4y ago
  Yeah if you're good and have the resume/experience to back it up, you won't have any issues getting great offers even in this market. Great candidates are not easy to find in any market.
  - avmich 4y ago
    This must be extremely subjective. Many times over I see very well qualified candidates spending months in this market looking for a position - when it took them weeks before.
    - asadlionpk 4y ago
      Well qualified != useful for the role.
      - grugagag 4y ago
        Meaning well versed and with 5 years experience in some fresh 2 years old technology stack?
    - klardotsh 4y ago
      Anecdotally, this. I'd never spent more than 3 weeks looking for a job prior to my October/November job hunt post-layoff. This one took about 6-7 weeks, all told (and likely would have come out closer to 8 had one branch path played out). I was intentionally looking for remote-first companies that seemed halfway stable, and was prioritizing those open to sub-40h workweeks (30h, 4DWW, 9-80, etc.), which admittedly, all three shrunk the pool tremendously (each), but particularly on workweek length, I was negotiable. I still had an overall horrible experience with the dozen or two companies I chatted with, and notably got some absolutely wild rejections (however, quite thankfully, also landed somewhere great after sifting through all of these): - absolute crickets, which made up about 33% of the "rejections" after a phone screen. This was unheard of pre-layoff rounds, but I understand that recruiters themselves suffered a lot of losses in this wave so I somewhat get it. - "We only hire SREs, and any role leveled Senior+, in San Francisco, there's too much context to offload remotely for leader roles" (this is, itself, such a glaring red flag that I was considering walking from this process anyway) - "You mentioned your preference to not do Coderpad-style interviews, and sadly, we only hire based on timed+video call Coderpad interviews, good luck!" (I basically never ran into this pre-2022 despite my stance on this issue almost never changing in my career, this was the cause of several rejections this time) - A subtype of the above, bombing a surprise (or once, "forgot to ask ahead of time and got scheduled for one that I decided to go to anyway") Coderpad/l33tcode/etc. style interview. Rejections on all but one of these, where I advanced and backed out for other reasons. - Being an SRE not married to Kubernetes I've learned is now often akin to no longer being an SRE. In fact I now question whether I truly consider myself "an SRE" in the current startup climate's sense of the word anymore. As an egregious example, one interview asked me to rate my skills and opinions on Kubernetes specifically. I answered honestly that I thought it was the right tool for many jobs, but not all jobs, and that I wouldn't claim to be a guru at it as I often use other tools that fit the tasks at hand better. Rejected.
Ancalagon 4y ago
Granted I've only attempted the Amazon interview of the FAANGs, but good job to the OP for cracking the FAANG interviews with only 60ish leetcode questions. I'm at 150 and have yet to crack any.
- mhlakhani 4y ago
  To be clear, I explicitly chose to not interview at FAANGs since I was previously at a FAANG and wanted to try my hand at a different type of company. I'd probably practice a bit more for FAANGs
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Can we just call it BigTech? Silly revolving acronym is probably closer to MAMA now... why is Netflix even a member other than to avoid a slur?
    - lesuorac 4y ago
      https://www.fastcompany.com/90790394/what-are-the-faang-companies https://www.fastcompany.com/90790394/what-are-the-faang-comp... They're in it because it was a bunch of high growth stock that also coincidentally paid very well so the name transfered from finance to programming.
    - Ancalagon 4y ago
      I prefer MA’AM tbh
  - bradlys 4y ago
    Is the comp comparable to FAANG or is it a big step down? (At least in terms of liquid compensation) This is partially why I haven't been interviewing. All the big p(l)ayers have slowed down their hiring so much - why bother taking a role that pays less than half.
    - mhlakhani 4y ago
      It varied, but I would say most places I looked at were comparable (or higher). there were a few places with lower comp that I was OK with (startups, or nonprofits).
vsareto 4y ago
That first impression (and how you tackled it) of system design interviews makes me question their usefulness. Like, how good of a signal can companies really be getting if it's too different from real world systems? Feels like an artificial wall too - many companies don't approach the scale where this stuff matters, so getting that experience is hard.
- mhlakhani 4y ago
  To be fair, these interviews provide a lot of valuable signal in terms of how you approach tradeoffs and explore a problem space. In that sense they're quite similar to the work I did at $dayjob, just in a compressed timeframe (which makes it challenging). As you said, the questions are similar to real world systems at these companies -- it's just that you won't have experience with these systems unless you've worked at these companies before. It's a catch-22.
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- Hermitian909 4y ago
  > Like, how good of a signal can companies really be getting if it's too different from real world systems? There are "layers" to the signal you can get from system design interviews: 1. Are they aware of "big concepts", indexing, sharding, queues, scheduling, etc. 2. Are they comfortable actually using and manipulating these abstractions in an academic sense? e.g. new college grads may have never used an index, but can walk me through how we might use one to solve a given problem. 3. Do they have experience operationalizing these concepts? e.g. in DB design questions I love it when candidates are able to walk through a zero downtime migration plan from before and after we add a feature. 4. Related to 3, How do they weight tradeoffs in the system? Do they drill down into product requirements to help inform these tradeoffs? A system design interview often lets me say: "They're not experienced enough at our scale for me to want to hire them at level X, but I'd hire them at level X-1" All this said, I do think more companies should try to draw design interview questions directly from their own company experience e.g. imagine we didn't have feature X, how would you add it to the product?
ssundarraj 4y ago
> Focus on your physical self: make sure you've gotten enough sleep, have food ready to go for lunch, and have breaks between the interviews if possible. If the interviewer asks if you need a minute at the start, and you do - please take it. This is great advice! I interviewed in 2022 and found that I performed significantly better when well rested. I also found that eating healthy helped during the post-lunch interviews. Thanks for sharing your experience.
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blobbers 4y ago
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- yamazakiwi 4y ago
  If you would be very successful in that role... but the company says no... that is a poor fit and is a reflection of their ability to hire qualified candidates to meet their real needs. I'm confused why this is funny ha ha to you...Care to expound?
  - dnissley 4y ago
    Sounds like sour grapes / cope, presumably. I didn't get that vibe reading it though.
    - mhlakhani 4y ago
      I was genuinely glad I didn't get those offers as it would be awkward turning them down. As an example, in one of the cases they were looking for someone who could do a lot more frontend/product work (something I don't have much experience in) so even if I did join, I wouldn't do well. That would suck both for me and the company. (yes, it is a bit of cope - but hey, it's only through interviewing/learning more that you find bad fits)
nsxwolf 4y ago
On my last job search I found that overloading myself with interviews was very stressful. It's one of the reason I will no longer continue with any process that has take home assignments - at one point I had 4 different assignments with overlapping due dates. Far too much stress (and I was ghosted on all of them). It's also not fun to be waiting to hear from the places you're really interested in while you've multiple exploding offers. One of the offers exploded before the date I was told it would. On the plus side I was able to use the offers as leverage to speed up the process at the job I finally did take. If I have to do it again I will set some sensible limits on myself.
- mikedelago 4y ago
  I don't blame you. Take home assignments are ridiculous, anyway. My personal time is valuable to me and it's unrealistic to expect me to do homework just for the privilege of an interview. In my last job hunt, I flat out declined further interview if I was requested to do a take home assignment.
  - dirtbag__dad 4y ago
    Would you prefer a take home or a live coding challenge? I have the total opposite experience. I have rarely done well on a live code problem, I clam up. Tbh it’s humiliating, not representative of my actual skill set, and a waste of everyone’s time. The amount of time I’d need to study to be good at live coding is less than doing a couple take homes for companies I’m actually interested in.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      The advantage of live coding challenges is that they require the employer to put skin in the game by allocating 1 hour of their own engineers' time. This encourages them to filter candidates beforehand and discarding bad-fits early rather than wasting every applicant's time even if they have no chance to begin with.
    - nsxwolf 4y ago
      The idea of a take home originally appealed to me, but my actual track record with them is very poor. They are usually too open ended - sometimes they'll say to write some service, that it shouldn't take more than an evening, and then you're left questioning how much they're expecting. Do they want a quick proof of concept? Do they want unit tests? Acceptance tests? Then there's the follow up - often a rejection with no comments on the code whatsoever. Or you get completely ghosted. Or, and this is the real kicker - they finally ask you to come in, where they have you do leetcode on a whiteboard anyway. If the process was "Here's what we're expecting, turn it in by X date, we'll have you do a review with the team, and assuming all goes well, we'll talk about an offer at that point" I would be a lot more open to them. But that's never the process.
fnimick 4y ago
This is just depressing. How is the technical interview process valuable _for companies_ at this point when it seems to be evaluating how well you can prepare for their specific leetcode interview, and how well you practice the incantation of the system design problem (make sure you follow the template and the pattern!) - do they really think they're selecting the best candidates, and not the most practiced interviewers?
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- ergonaught 4y ago
  They aren't putting much real thought into it. Beyond the barest basics, 99% of the time the only thing that's genuinely relevant is whether or not the team wants to work with the candidate. Almost nothing else that is relevant is even knowable until after they're actually working. Exceptions only prove the rule. It's a sham but I guess it makes someone feel like they've contributed value somehow.
- abrahms 4y ago
  It's a selection for socio-economic status. Hiring people who have enough excess time to do this grinding excludes people like parents of young toddlers. So.. you'll probably get a bunch of young single people w/ enough income to not need to have multiple gigs.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    Since when was ‘parent of toddlers’ a kind of socioeconomic status? (Not that I disagree with you that it disadvantages such people). Also note that the OP said they found the coding questions were mostly easy/easier than they expected so maybe the amount of work required (for older/more experienced candidates) on preparation is not so high? I dunno.
- dgb23 4y ago
  I think the best way to interview is to just have an experienced, respected worker or two ask some questions, which hopefully leads into a normal conversation about work. Talk about specific problems, nerd out about tech.
gymbeaux 4y ago
Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. We must prove to companies that leetcode is not the way.
- jrockway 4y ago
  I asked ChatGPT one of my company's interview questions (which involves designing a bloom filter). It got it very subtly wrong; when asked to fix things, it made it worse. I would definitely not use it to interview for jobs yet, but I do think it would be good for training interviewers to detect BS and suggest "hints" that lead things in the right direction. Practice interview without wasting any human's time! Meanwhile, humans have not really struggled with this problem. We tell you what a bloom filter is, you just have to write the code to spec. (This is different than some interviews where you need to know the answer to the trivia question; know what a bloom filter is and how to implement one, or you fail. ChatGPT was not capable of either.) Overall my take on the current state of AI-produced computer programs is that the programmer is forced to take on the role of code reviewer and detail checker, which I think is a more difficult problem than just typing in code in a green-field environment. The thing that's difficult about reviewing code is that things can diverge away from your mental model so quickly, that you don't know which details you should be checking up on. When you're writing it from scratch, you don't lead yourself astray in the same way. In a few years this could be completely different, of course.
  - gymbeaux 4y ago
    It's been working well for me all things considered. The harder the leetcode problem, the more I have to ask it to fit the answer it gives me, but I have always gotten it to arrive at the correct (and most efficient) answer. I'm impressed. You'll have a better time with it if you can tell it what's wrong with the code, even if it's just "given this test case, I expected X but this code gives me Y".
- paxys 4y ago
  You don't need OpenGPT (or whatever else) to "cheat" at interviews. Simply copy pasting the prompt in Google is going to get you much better results, most often the exact leetcode page that the question was lifted from (with very useful discussion and solutions). Of course most competent companies will ask a minor follow-up which will stump candidates who are relying on such tools.
Sodman 4y ago
I get that it's still a candidates market (especially for strong candidates like OP who can get 11 offers from 13 full attempts), but the spreadsheet of questions you should be asking a company linked in TFA has some eyebrow raising notes and unreasonable expectations imho. For example - there's a big pushback that any hiring manager worried about a candidate who don't have required skills they could learn in 6-12 months is "quibbling". Is this a generally held belief? In the startup space in particular, most folks I interview frequently have consistent < 2 year stints at most if not all of their prior companies. Expecting a 12 month ramp-up time on a particular piece of technology needed to do the job would be an immediate no-hire from me. If I personally joined a company and couldn't meaningfully contribute for the first year, I would consider that a complete failure and expect to be let go. Do other people feel differently? Perhaps this expectation is more applicable to larger companies than startups?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  This is why we can’t have nice things. Every company wants to make minimum investment in hires and hires want to jump to get paid as much as possible. Game theory playing out.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Months? Try weeks and even then you should be able to pick up basic things in a week or two.
- eulers_secret 4y ago
  When I was doing Linux driver dev, it was expected new hires would take 8-12 months to ramp up and start to contribute (usually not well at first). When I asked the Mesa devs how long ramp-up was I was told around 12-18 months. When I was working on ChromeOS we expected about 6 months of ramp. I guess it’s just different projects and jobs at companies. I would never hold my breath to find a candidate that had experience in any of the above.
- csomar 4y ago
  If you are doing Front-End dev pushing React Components, I think you should ramp-up from Week 1. Some other comment here mentioned this though: some fields it's not possible. If you are doing drivers, kernel, ebpf, or say you are programming Bitcoin main node; you probably need to read a lot before you are able to make any contribution.
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zeroCalories 4y ago
Those are some impressive numbers. While it seems clear that you can get interviews applying through websites and recruiters, I'm amazed by how effective networking is. Any suggestions on how I should manage that? I add people on LinkedIn, but that's about it. Don't really socialize or make friends with people at work.
- wikibob 4y ago
  The answer is to socialize and make friends at work. People who try to “Network” artificially won’t see great success. People who are genuinely take an interest in what others are doing, and are intentional about meeting once or twice a year for coffee to catch up, are the ones who can call in a favor in the way described in the blog post.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    And attend events, make an effort to work with people at partner companies/clients/customers/etc. That's how I've always landed new positions. I've never actually applied for a position since grad school years ago.
- gherkinnn 4y ago
  > Don’t really socialize or make friends with people at work Well there you have it. No need to be besties, just spend time with people you like. Be it at work or elsewhere. The rest follows.
bubba_sparks 4y ago
I'd rather be tortured by al qaeda than go through all that. I wish someone would write an article on how to hack this process. There's always a back door. Then again if there were I wouldn't be sharing it here.
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- propogandist 4y ago
  al qaeda means the database, and as with all DBs, it has a backdoor operated by the CIA.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  The back door is being friends with the HM
angarg12 4y ago
I know it's a very touchy subject, but it would be immensely helpful if OP posted numbers about the offers he got. Personally, my compensation is underwater due to the recent stock crash, and leadership has insinuated to expect zilch for 2023. I'm not in the job market due to visa, but I feel the insane comp bubble has burst, and I missed the train. I'm anxious to see how the job market evolves over the next year, but I'm afraid we won't see compensation packages nearly close to how they were the last couple of years.
- mhlakhani 4y ago
  I agree it's touchy unfortunately. I'm not comfortable sharing in public due to $REASONS, but I have been sharing with friends/family/folks who've been looking. I will say I got offers comparable to my pre-stock crash comp, but I hit a comp cliff either way in 2022 (even without the crash).
  - joshka 4y ago
    Would you be fine with sharing the company list?
TimPC 4y ago
You absolutely can prepare for system interviews it’s just some of the best content for doing so is behind paywalls. I opted to buy a course on leetcode covering this topic and my performance before was like night and day. Going through about 20 worked examples each of which has a 45 minute explanation means learning about 60 patterns you can slot into various problems. Once you’ve seen the patterns it’s a lot easier to apply them in different contexts to piece together the system you want.
- jacurtis 4y ago
  Thats a good endorsement. I've seen those and wondered if they were a waste of time. I think I might consider one now if it was that beneficial. I have no problem paying for educational content. But I was afraid that stuff was just institutional fluff and internal-marketing.
- ripley12 4y ago
  Yeah, you can also pay to do system design interviewing practice. I did a few paid system design interviews last year (interviewing.io) and found it helpful before a few FAANG interviews.
- preciousoo 4y ago
  What course did you use, if you don’t mind sharing?
  - TimPC 4y ago
    It’s the Code Karle one. The presenter has a thick Indian accent but is still understandable, which I’d probably say was the main negative.
    - lance_klusener 4y ago
      Is there one for leetcode patterns? I googled Code karle and found a site with system design interviews.
      - 4y ago
65 4y ago
This is valuable for corporate software engineers working on giant systems. But what about non-corporate software engineers? What about web developers? The interview process is very different depending on the company.
- jstx1 4y ago
  > What about web developers? It depends on the company, not on the domain. OP might as well be a web developer, most developers are.
vavooom 4y ago
The list of questions to ask in an interview they provide is quite thoughtful and well organized: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11DoQ-Bhvs5mfRwB0Bz6OHwoChhFVK7u_KqlbFgR-ezY/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11DoQ-Bhvs5mfRwB0Bz6O...
5544ffee 4y ago
> November: Interviews all day erryday What a luxury! I only had 3 weeks of vacation and burned through almost all of it because every company expects you to do multiple rounds of interviews during business hours. Eventually I just quit because it was literally impossible to search for a job while working full time.
- mhlakhani 4y ago
  I was between jobs so I had the luxury to do this - I wouldn't recommend this heavy a schedule for people who already have a job. It's impossible.
- jstx1 4y ago
  Even if you have the free time, I'm surprised that they managed to batch the different stages and have all interviews in the same time period. If I'm interviewing, at any given time I'll be sending out resumes, and talking to recruiters, and doing technical interviews, and waiting for feedback asynchronously for different companies.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
> I completed full interview loops at 13 companies and received 11 offers. I'm glad I got the rejections I did - it was clear there wasn't a mutual match. 11 out of 13 seems like a really extremely good hit rate. Even a 50% offer rate would be really good so I'm guessing this person is way better at interviewing than most of us. As most of these interviews were in in October/November I wonder if it would go as well now? Or in 2 or 3 months?
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  Seems like we have managed to implement winner take all in Tech interviews too. Of course most people get 0 offers from 13 interviews
- mhlakhani 4y ago
  I filtered companies down to places where I felt I had a good chance of success, and applied to jobs within my comfort zone - this was a very biased sample. I don't think this generalizes unfortunately
- claytonjy 4y ago
  13 companies where he completed the entire interview circuit. The further you get in an interview circuit, the more likely you are to continue, and thus to eventually get an offer. Only getting offers from 50% of those might indicate you're doing something surprising towards the end, like coming across as a jerk to the skip-level+ the last interview is usually with.
- angarg12 4y ago
  I suspect you'd be able to land fewer interviews if you repeated this experience now. However the most interesting stat is missing: compensation offers. I bet offers being handed today are across the board lower than even just 1 quarter ago.
- Falkon1313 4y ago
  That's 11 out of 35. A 31% hit rate. Still not bad. Being more selective (3 to 5 places instead of 35) could've maybe gotten a 75%+ hit rate (but also might've missed the best one).
5544ffee 4y ago
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Topgamer7 4y ago
The very first link in the blog post to another blog post is missing /blog at the start of the data.
- mhlakhani 4y ago
  whoops - will fix, thank you!
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
In the job market right now. I have a question about talking to recruiters. I am talking to a couple of them, who are working with companies whose name or location they won't even disclose until the company looks at my CV and decides to move ahead. But the recruiters want me to specify a salary expectation. But my salary expectations depend on whether I am living in the downtown of large city or in a smaller city, or able to work remotely. What number do I specify, or how do I approach the situation otherwise?
- mhlakhani 4y ago
  I've generally had bad experiences with third party recruiters so I try to avoid them when I can. in your position I'd probably be upfront and mention the ranges you are OK with in the different situations.
- Cypher 4y ago
  The trick is to give a range where the low end is one you're happy with and top end is of the jobs who you're going for. At the end of the day it's a filter and not the be all end all that you'll accept when negotiating time comes.
- pandaman 4y ago
  Tell them you are working with the other recruiters so if they don't want to double-submit (which invalidates the candidate in most cases unless the resume is so good the company does not mind paying double commission) they will have to tell you which companies they are submitting to. If they still refuse to tell - they don't work with anybody and just submit you to any open job ad they can find, you can do the same yourself with a lower chance of screwing up (e.g. the aforementioned double submission or the company explicitly rejecting any representation).
- kurizu4444 4y ago
  It is okay to change your salary expectations as you uncover more information about the job
- fijiaarone 4y ago
  Quote a really high number and then don’t return their calls.
coding123 4y ago
I try not to burn my referrals all at once. Nothing wrong with that, but I tend to do applications with places where I am referred one at a time. Otherwise I'll feel like I'm turning down a friend should the place make an offer.
the_jends 4y ago
I think this write up is a good resource for those who got called into at least an interview. I wonder how does one improve if the rejections come even before a single interview? At that stage companies typically will not give you any reason for the rejection either for legal reasons or simply convenience. This leaves you hesitating whether to apply to other companies for fear they will reject you for the same unknown reason. Maybe someone who has been in the other side of equation can explain, what are the common reasons would get someone discarded before an interview and is there really no way to communicate those better to the rejectee?
- jacurtis 4y ago
  This is almost impossible to answer because there are so many reasons that it could be. But I've been hiring manager and looked through thousands of resumes/CVs and hired about 50-60 engineers. 1. Far under-qualified. People apply for senior positions with literally 18 months of experience ALL THE TIME. Seriously... ALL THE TIME. 2. Too many technologies on your CV. A lot of resumes will just list every language or technology on the planet. Its a shotgun technique to just list everything and hope something sticks. The problem with this is that you can't be good at everything. When you say you are confident or even expert in 30 different languages, then it just tells me I can't trust anything on your resume. 3. Titles that don't make sense. Your titles at companies should be standard. Don't put "Javascript Ninja Pro II". Wtf is that? Just put "Software Engineer II - Javascript". Also, in the vein of job titles that don't make sense is someone who worked as a junior engineer for 6 months, and then their next job is as a Senior level engineer. This is scary common, seriously. You're either lying or delusional, either way I'm moving to the next CV. 4. Colorful resumes. Resumes should be text documents. A colored line below a header or little highlights are fine, but its not a graphics design job. Cutesy resumes just make me worried that someone is overcompensating or hasn't been in the industry enough. A lot of cute resumes have tons of whitespace and design to take up space and make a light resume fill fuller. These resumes are super common with bootcamp grads. Maybe bootcamps are selling resume templates as art projects. Don't know, don't care. Usually a well qualified engineer will want a text dense resume so they have more space to brag about all the amazing things they have accomplished. If youre using space for fancy designs then you probably don't have enough content on your resume. It's essentially wasted opportunity. 5. Resumes with Personal Photos. DO NOT EVERY SUBMIT A RESUME WITH YOUR PHOTO ON IT. I have a rule that I automatically reject any resume with someone's photo. It's too risky. I can either get accused of favoring a certain race/gender/ethnicity/etc or being prejudiced against them. So instead I automatically reject any resume with a personal photo. You can be the worlds best engineer and you won't get a call back from me because you added a personal photo on your resume. A lot of companies have this rule too. So if you are adding your photo to your resume you are doing far more harm than good to yourself. 6. Too long. Most resumes should be 2 pages. If you are just getting into the industry and only have < 3 jobs then you should use 1 page. If you are a veteran than use 3 pages. Never go above 3 pages. Anything above 3 pages will get cut. Three pages is enough to give even a staff-level engineer plenty of space to talk about their accomplishments. Anything more than that is an autobiography and I don't have time for it. Learn to cut fluff and give me your greatest hits on a resume. You are just trying to get an interview. You'll have HOURS in far-too-long interview process to give us your verbal autobiography. Save the greatest hits for the resume/CV. 7. Pattern of short job history. Some companies might not care. But if you have a consistent pattern of only working somewhere for 6 months (again, very common) then it tells me you are just job hoping. I know the saying that this is the best way to get a raise in tech. But if youve had 4 jobs in 2 years then I won't waste my time. It will take you 6 months to even start to provide value at the company, and i don't want to be replacing your position twice a year. Im fine with a single job that has a short stint. Just as long as its not a pattern of behavior. Its really common to get resumes with engineers that have 6-8 jobs and only 3 years of experience (Its very common). I'm not delusional enough to believe that our company will be the one you stick around with. So I move on from this. As long as you have an average pattern of at least a year with jobs, then you're fine. If you worked contract, this is different and you should list that in the job description. 8. No good bullet points. With each job you should list things you accomplished. "Built the website using Javascript and React" is not an accomplishment. If you don't have specific accomplishments to list and everything about each job is superficial, then I will assume your contributions at the company were superficial. 9. No Progress on Resume. Your resume should tell a story. If I look at someone who has worked somewhere for 3 years and didn't get a title change or promotion during that time, then I get worried that they aren't providing good quality work. Good engineers get promotions. I'd expect to see that story as I read down your resume. If you look stagnant then the resume will get tossed. 10. No Clear Direction. I want to see that someone is looking for a specific type of job or they are pointing their career in a certain direction. This is visible by the content on the resume being focused in one area or direction and the pattern of jobs taken. I see a lot of resumes where people take a job as an ETL Engineer for 18 months. Then they are a full stack engineer for 12 months. Then they get into sysadmin work for 12 months and now apply for Backend Java. If you have legit reasons for meandering in your career then it should be in your cover letter or explained in 1-2 brief sentences at the top. Stuff that doesn't matter. - Your home address, not sure why people put this on there. I'm not going to knock on your door to schedule an interview. I'll get your address if/when you're hired. - Photos. Its a engineering or tech job, not a modeling gig. See #5, these automatically get cut by most companies for risk of subconscious bias. - Mission Statement. Sure put a sentence or two if you want. But "Get a job in software engineering" is not a mission. If that's all you have to say then leave it off. Mission statement is not going to have any impact positive or negative on you getting a job. So why bother having it there. - Jokes. You're not going to get hired because of a joke and its really hard to tell whether stuff is a joke or you're just crazy when its on a resume. You're not lightening the mood, you are confusing the hiring manager. When a hiring manager gets confused while looking at the resume, the resume goes in the trash. So jokes are only going to hurt you. - Typos. I don't immediately dismiss resumes for a single typo. But more than 3+ and I probably will. Its easy enough to use spell check. If there are typos it is because you rushed the resume-building, have no attention to detail, or just don't care. One or two typos are fine. But a pattern is concerning.
listenallyall 4y ago
> After leaving Meta recently That's all I needed to hear. Back in the day, the college you went to opened (or shut) doors to get interviews. And most people, who did not attend an Ivy League school or similar, rejected the concept as being anti-meritocratic. However, today, it's the same thing -- just replace college with the company(ies) you list on your resume. A shitty programmer with a bad attitude from Meta, Google, etc. is far more likely to get opportunities than the best programmer in the entire insurance industry, or the person who wrote the greatest dry-cleaner management software. It's quite unfortunate.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Would the person who wrote the best dry-cleaner management software do well at a company like Google? That is, I think a lot of the required skills there are ‘getting things done in a company the size of Google’ and having worked at Meta for a few years is perhaps a better signal for that than having made some great software. Likewise someone from Google may have a harder time in some startup where the structure is different and they don’t have all the fancy google tools or services. To be clear, I don’t want to imply that someone who makes great dry cleaner management software is a bad programmer or that they couldn’t be successful at Google or that Google look at the right signals and have good processes or that the startups who should have a different hiring strategy don’t copy google too much.
  - listenallyall 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - j-bos 4y ago
      Your point can be made with more civility.
    - dan-robertson 4y ago
      Yeah, so one thing that is pretty naturally frustrating is that hiring processes are incredibly unfair in the sense that perceived quality of candidates by the process is often wildly unrelated to how they would perform at the job and, in particular, the processes often rate poorly many candidates who would make excellent hires. This unfairness does not feel good but I think it would be worse to require companies to be fair (likely their definition of fairness would be bad and processes would converge more meaning all companies were competing for exactly the same candidates) and it is reasonable for companies for these processes to be unfair as their goal is to hire N candidates who meet their bar, rather than to find all candidates who meet their bar and randomly select N of them. I do think it is bad for companies but I think it’s bad that the processes are ineffective (ie missing excellent candidates; overpaying for mid candidates due to competing with everyone else for the same people) rather than because they are unfair. One thing to note about the article is the person seems to have had some reasonable variation in interview process between companies. Perhaps if the hypothetical dry cleaner management software maker applied to a company that did work-sample tests, they would get a chance to shine by being good at programming and taking feedback and working on actual problems independently for example, even if they didn’t do a good job at passing the candidate screen or doing ‘algorithms’ at a more traditional company.
m0llusk 4y ago
Ninety minutes to do a thing. Evaluations are hard, but that barely relates to my experience as an engineer in any way. Couldn't they ask in detail about previous work instead?
charlie0 4y ago
Don't feel bad if you're doing everything listed in the article and still failing. One look at this person's resume and it answered everything. This is not your average Software Dev. and they have 10 yrs experience. Keep grinding my friends, you'll get there.
langsoul-com 4y ago
Lots of this advice is great for very senior people, they're a lot market. Anyone below really doesn't have the same luxury to be so picky and choosey. I've applied for hundreds of jobs, most rejected without a phone or interview call. Shit is tough. Ain't got no leeway.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Job Hunting in 2022

Thanks for sharing. Congrats to the author. 11 offers is amazing I doubt one can get so many in today's market but the good thing is you dont really need so many, 1 good one is enough. Ideally you have 2 so that you can nagotiate more easily.

mhlakhani 4y ago
thanks! I agree that you don't need this many offers - I took the time to interview at more places since I wanted to explore what was out there. Wouldn't recommend interviewing this heavily.

WoodenChair 4y ago

I wrote a similar post but my search was in May instead of at the end of the year: https://www.observationalhazard.com/2022/05/my-experience-with-technical-interviews_36.html https://www.observationalhazard.com/2022/05/my-experience-wi...

avmich 4y ago
I wonder, if somebody has not a happy story, but an ongoing story of failures in job search - would he write such a story? Or we hear only from those who succeeds? Or, assuming that everybody eventually succeeds, those who take years to find a position won't write about it, as they are too exhausted or embarrassed?
- mhlakhani 4y ago
  I've heard / read stories from people who tried really hard and failed to find jobs (both within tech, but unfortunately more common outside of tech). Unfortunately they don't get as much traction as people prefer to hear stories with a happy ending
- ergonaught 4y ago
  7 months deep, hundreds of applications, blah blah, so to answer your question, for the most part people in this particular situation don't write public stories about it. 1) It can feel like it will sabotage your chances even if it raises awareness of your situation. Firstly because you cannot help but "call out" some of the hiring practices/people, and secondly because, well, must be something wrong with you if no one is snapping you up, right? Which leads into... 2) A lot of really obnoxious folks like to pounce on this and "blame the victim", and then reference stuff like this post to show how "it must be your fault", etc, and "ain't nobody got time for that". It's hard enough to deal with impostor syndrome kicking the brains in without inviting the mob to kick as well. 3) It's depressing to think about it, much less to write all that down where it becomes an objective thing that cannot be ignored. Especially if you've tracked everything in detail (I have). Much more pleasant to sell off your belongings and pretend you're just embracing minimalism and forget about it. 4) Feels a lot like begging, and there are many complicated reasons why people mostly don't like to do that.
- bradlys 4y ago
  People write them - they just don't gain traction. You also don't tend to write them with your name attached because that literally throws your own name down the drain. People are also not interested in hearing troubling stories because everyone has a troubling story. They want to hear how you succeeded because they want to emulate that success. They want to learn the "one small trick" that will lead them to finally getting the job of their dreams.
- rsaarsoo 4y ago
  If you ask for it... I've been hunting for a job for more than a year now. Well, perhaps not hunting as I haven't sent out nearly as much resumes during that time as the author of this story. Though when I do apply, I usually also get to an interview. The interviewing causes a lot of stress to me. Even though I have never failed a coding interview, I utterly hate doing these. (Thankfully I've never had any hard leetcode problems thrown at me - I would have failed miserably.) I have also been a lot on the other side of the table, though I found even that to be a big source of stress to me. I personally believe these coding tasks are only good for filtering out the bad candidates - you can't use them to find great candidates. The last big company I worked at gradually steered towards harder and harder coding problems, until one day I just pulled out of the interviewing process as I felt that I personally would no more get hired. I wish more companies would be more flexible in their interviewing process. Like, I have several open source projects which mostly revolve around various forms of static code analysis - why do I need to prove that I can write fizzbuzz? Recently I had a pretty nice coding interview where the main task was not about me writing code, but instead reading the code that a junior developer had written and helping him sort out why the code doesn't work and how to improve it. This was the most real-work-like task I've experienced, I even found myself enjoying it. Most of the rejections I've had have been along the lines of: "While we find your technical skills excellent, you don't really look that motivated / we think we might not have the right kind of challenge for you." So, I'm in a bit of a dilemma. If I would strive to send out more resumes, most of these jobs are likely something that I'm not overly excited about, and so I will get rejected because I don't look committed enough. But if I try to look for a dream job, then that will likely never happen. I feel like I'm doomed either way. During this whole job search I did get one offer, but I rejected it, as I heard rumors about the owners of the company being complete assholes. (Like monitoring workers through security cameras to make sure they're working at their desks.) Thankfully I've had enough savings from my previous employments and I tend to live a fairly cheap life. Nevertheless, my savings are starting to run low now, which adds pressure to finally find a job. Well, I still have the option of selling my second house (so I'm still far from being financially ruined).

sbuccini 4y ago

Thanks to the author for taking the time to write this up. I think it is a fairly realistic description of what the process is like for an engineer who has spent several years working in Silicon Valley at a well-known company. The key takeaways, coming from someone with a similar background: * Rely heavily on your personal network to both identify worthwhile opportunities and for referrals which, in the Before Times, pretty much guaranteed an interview * It's worth thinking through what type of job would make you happy _before_ you get an exploding offer * They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight. It's a grind, but you definitely get "in the zone". Additionally, setting this goal ensures that you are being properly proactive/aggressive in pursuing opportunities. * You will probably see a design interview at any FAANG or hot startup. The classic one I've seen like 5 times is "how would you design a social media feed?" I still do not know the "correct" answer to this question. I don't have hard evidence for this but it seems that the demand is still very strong for experienced engineering managers. I am curious to hear if the author interviewed for SWE positions or engineering manager positions have they have filled both roles in the past.

mhlakhani 4y ago
author here - glad to see this post on HN, and glad you liked it! re: your last question - I interviewed for both SWE and EM positions, depending on what was available at any given company. At companies that had both roles open, I talked to folks to understand what they expected out of EMs vs engineers, as it varied a lot - and then I picked whatever was more appealing to me. In aggregate I went for 70% SWE / 30% EM roles (roughly)
- veqq 4y ago
  > what they expected out of EMs vs engineers, as it varied a lot I'm curious about the rough models which exist.
  - ketzo 4y ago
    One of the most basic is “do your managers write code?” My first company out of college actually banned it as a practice - EMs were not allowed to be active contributors. I know at some companies, it’s actually a requirement, or at least heavily encouraged, for a manager to spend at least 20% time writing code. And then some places are a mixed bag. I can see both arguments! Just good to know that a company has a coherent philosophy on the issue.

asadlionpk 4y ago

Sounds about expected even in current conditions. If you are fairly skilled programmer, somewhat senior. These layoffs don’t matter. I assure you that you won’t die of hunger if you quit/are laid off. Plenty of demand for non-coasters.

askafriend 4y ago
Yeah if you're good and have the resume/experience to back it up, you won't have any issues getting great offers even in this market. Great candidates are not easy to find in any market.
- avmich 4y ago
  This must be extremely subjective. Many times over I see very well qualified candidates spending months in this market looking for a position - when it took them weeks before.
  - asadlionpk 4y ago
    Well qualified != useful for the role.
    - grugagag 4y ago
      Meaning well versed and with 5 years experience in some fresh 2 years old technology stack?
  - klardotsh 4y ago
    Anecdotally, this. I'd never spent more than 3 weeks looking for a job prior to my October/November job hunt post-layoff. This one took about 6-7 weeks, all told (and likely would have come out closer to 8 had one branch path played out). I was intentionally looking for remote-first companies that seemed halfway stable, and was prioritizing those open to sub-40h workweeks (30h, 4DWW, 9-80, etc.), which admittedly, all three shrunk the pool tremendously (each), but particularly on workweek length, I was negotiable. I still had an overall horrible experience with the dozen or two companies I chatted with, and notably got some absolutely wild rejections (however, quite thankfully, also landed somewhere great after sifting through all of these): - absolute crickets, which made up about 33% of the "rejections" after a phone screen. This was unheard of pre-layoff rounds, but I understand that recruiters themselves suffered a lot of losses in this wave so I somewhat get it. - "We only hire SREs, and any role leveled Senior+, in San Francisco, there's too much context to offload remotely for leader roles" (this is, itself, such a glaring red flag that I was considering walking from this process anyway) - "You mentioned your preference to not do Coderpad-style interviews, and sadly, we only hire based on timed+video call Coderpad interviews, good luck!" (I basically never ran into this pre-2022 despite my stance on this issue almost never changing in my career, this was the cause of several rejections this time) - A subtype of the above, bombing a surprise (or once, "forgot to ask ahead of time and got scheduled for one that I decided to go to anyway") Coderpad/l33tcode/etc. style interview. Rejections on all but one of these, where I advanced and backed out for other reasons. - Being an SRE not married to Kubernetes I've learned is now often akin to no longer being an SRE. In fact I now question whether I truly consider myself "an SRE" in the current startup climate's sense of the word anymore. As an egregious example, one interview asked me to rate my skills and opinions on Kubernetes specifically. I answered honestly that I thought it was the right tool for many jobs, but not all jobs, and that I wouldn't claim to be a guru at it as I often use other tools that fit the tasks at hand better. Rejected.

Ancalagon 4y ago

Granted I've only attempted the Amazon interview of the FAANGs, but good job to the OP for cracking the FAANG interviews with only 60ish leetcode questions. I'm at 150 and have yet to crack any.

mhlakhani 4y ago
To be clear, I explicitly chose to not interview at FAANGs since I was previously at a FAANG and wanted to try my hand at a different type of company. I'd probably practice a bit more for FAANGs
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Can we just call it BigTech? Silly revolving acronym is probably closer to MAMA now... why is Netflix even a member other than to avoid a slur?
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    https://www.fastcompany.com/90790394/what-are-the-faang-companies https://www.fastcompany.com/90790394/what-are-the-faang-comp... They're in it because it was a bunch of high growth stock that also coincidentally paid very well so the name transfered from finance to programming.
  - Ancalagon 4y ago
    I prefer MA’AM tbh
- bradlys 4y ago
  Is the comp comparable to FAANG or is it a big step down? (At least in terms of liquid compensation) This is partially why I haven't been interviewing. All the big p(l)ayers have slowed down their hiring so much - why bother taking a role that pays less than half.
  - mhlakhani 4y ago
    It varied, but I would say most places I looked at were comparable (or higher). there were a few places with lower comp that I was OK with (startups, or nonprofits).

vsareto 4y ago

That first impression (and how you tackled it) of system design interviews makes me question their usefulness. Like, how good of a signal can companies really be getting if it's too different from real world systems? Feels like an artificial wall too - many companies don't approach the scale where this stuff matters, so getting that experience is hard.

mhlakhani 4y ago
To be fair, these interviews provide a lot of valuable signal in terms of how you approach tradeoffs and explore a problem space. In that sense they're quite similar to the work I did at $dayjob, just in a compressed timeframe (which makes it challenging). As you said, the questions are similar to real world systems at these companies -- it's just that you won't have experience with these systems unless you've worked at these companies before. It's a catch-22.
deleted 4y ago
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Hermitian909 4y ago
> Like, how good of a signal can companies really be getting if it's too different from real world systems? There are "layers" to the signal you can get from system design interviews: 1. Are they aware of "big concepts", indexing, sharding, queues, scheduling, etc. 2. Are they comfortable actually using and manipulating these abstractions in an academic sense? e.g. new college grads may have never used an index, but can walk me through how we might use one to solve a given problem. 3. Do they have experience operationalizing these concepts? e.g. in DB design questions I love it when candidates are able to walk through a zero downtime migration plan from before and after we add a feature. 4. Related to 3, How do they weight tradeoffs in the system? Do they drill down into product requirements to help inform these tradeoffs? A system design interview often lets me say: "They're not experienced enough at our scale for me to want to hire them at level X, but I'd hire them at level X-1" All this said, I do think more companies should try to draw design interview questions directly from their own company experience e.g. imagine we didn't have feature X, how would you add it to the product?

ssundarraj 4y ago

> Focus on your physical self: make sure you've gotten enough sleep, have food ready to go for lunch, and have breaks between the interviews if possible. If the interviewer asks if you need a minute at the start, and you do - please take it. This is great advice! I interviewed in 2022 and found that I performed significantly better when well rested. I also found that eating healthy helped during the post-lunch interviews. Thanks for sharing your experience.

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blobbers 4y ago

[flagged]

yamazakiwi 4y ago
If you would be very successful in that role... but the company says no... that is a poor fit and is a reflection of their ability to hire qualified candidates to meet their real needs. I'm confused why this is funny ha ha to you...Care to expound?
- dnissley 4y ago
  Sounds like sour grapes / cope, presumably. I didn't get that vibe reading it though.
  - mhlakhani 4y ago
    I was genuinely glad I didn't get those offers as it would be awkward turning them down. As an example, in one of the cases they were looking for someone who could do a lot more frontend/product work (something I don't have much experience in) so even if I did join, I wouldn't do well. That would suck both for me and the company. (yes, it is a bit of cope - but hey, it's only through interviewing/learning more that you find bad fits)

nsxwolf 4y ago

On my last job search I found that overloading myself with interviews was very stressful. It's one of the reason I will no longer continue with any process that has take home assignments - at one point I had 4 different assignments with overlapping due dates. Far too much stress (and I was ghosted on all of them). It's also not fun to be waiting to hear from the places you're really interested in while you've multiple exploding offers. One of the offers exploded before the date I was told it would. On the plus side I was able to use the offers as leverage to speed up the process at the job I finally did take. If I have to do it again I will set some sensible limits on myself.

mikedelago 4y ago
I don't blame you. Take home assignments are ridiculous, anyway. My personal time is valuable to me and it's unrealistic to expect me to do homework just for the privilege of an interview. In my last job hunt, I flat out declined further interview if I was requested to do a take home assignment.
- dirtbag__dad 4y ago
  Would you prefer a take home or a live coding challenge? I have the total opposite experience. I have rarely done well on a live code problem, I clam up. Tbh it’s humiliating, not representative of my actual skill set, and a waste of everyone’s time. The amount of time I’d need to study to be good at live coding is less than doing a couple take homes for companies I’m actually interested in.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    The advantage of live coding challenges is that they require the employer to put skin in the game by allocating 1 hour of their own engineers' time. This encourages them to filter candidates beforehand and discarding bad-fits early rather than wasting every applicant's time even if they have no chance to begin with.
  - nsxwolf 4y ago
    The idea of a take home originally appealed to me, but my actual track record with them is very poor. They are usually too open ended - sometimes they'll say to write some service, that it shouldn't take more than an evening, and then you're left questioning how much they're expecting. Do they want a quick proof of concept? Do they want unit tests? Acceptance tests? Then there's the follow up - often a rejection with no comments on the code whatsoever. Or you get completely ghosted. Or, and this is the real kicker - they finally ask you to come in, where they have you do leetcode on a whiteboard anyway. If the process was "Here's what we're expecting, turn it in by X date, we'll have you do a review with the team, and assuming all goes well, we'll talk about an offer at that point" I would be a lot more open to them. But that's never the process.

fnimick 4y ago

This is just depressing. How is the technical interview process valuable _for companies_ at this point when it seems to be evaluating how well you can prepare for their specific leetcode interview, and how well you practice the incantation of the system design problem (make sure you follow the template and the pattern!) - do they really think they're selecting the best candidates, and not the most practiced interviewers?

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ergonaught 4y ago
They aren't putting much real thought into it. Beyond the barest basics, 99% of the time the only thing that's genuinely relevant is whether or not the team wants to work with the candidate. Almost nothing else that is relevant is even knowable until after they're actually working. Exceptions only prove the rule. It's a sham but I guess it makes someone feel like they've contributed value somehow.
abrahms 4y ago
It's a selection for socio-economic status. Hiring people who have enough excess time to do this grinding excludes people like parents of young toddlers. So.. you'll probably get a bunch of young single people w/ enough income to not need to have multiple gigs.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Since when was ‘parent of toddlers’ a kind of socioeconomic status? (Not that I disagree with you that it disadvantages such people). Also note that the OP said they found the coding questions were mostly easy/easier than they expected so maybe the amount of work required (for older/more experienced candidates) on preparation is not so high? I dunno.
dgb23 4y ago
I think the best way to interview is to just have an experienced, respected worker or two ask some questions, which hopefully leads into a normal conversation about work. Talk about specific problems, nerd out about tech.

gymbeaux 4y ago

Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. We must prove to companies that leetcode is not the way.

jrockway 4y ago
I asked ChatGPT one of my company's interview questions (which involves designing a bloom filter). It got it very subtly wrong; when asked to fix things, it made it worse. I would definitely not use it to interview for jobs yet, but I do think it would be good for training interviewers to detect BS and suggest "hints" that lead things in the right direction. Practice interview without wasting any human's time! Meanwhile, humans have not really struggled with this problem. We tell you what a bloom filter is, you just have to write the code to spec. (This is different than some interviews where you need to know the answer to the trivia question; know what a bloom filter is and how to implement one, or you fail. ChatGPT was not capable of either.) Overall my take on the current state of AI-produced computer programs is that the programmer is forced to take on the role of code reviewer and detail checker, which I think is a more difficult problem than just typing in code in a green-field environment. The thing that's difficult about reviewing code is that things can diverge away from your mental model so quickly, that you don't know which details you should be checking up on. When you're writing it from scratch, you don't lead yourself astray in the same way. In a few years this could be completely different, of course.
- gymbeaux 4y ago
  It's been working well for me all things considered. The harder the leetcode problem, the more I have to ask it to fit the answer it gives me, but I have always gotten it to arrive at the correct (and most efficient) answer. I'm impressed. You'll have a better time with it if you can tell it what's wrong with the code, even if it's just "given this test case, I expected X but this code gives me Y".
paxys 4y ago
You don't need OpenGPT (or whatever else) to "cheat" at interviews. Simply copy pasting the prompt in Google is going to get you much better results, most often the exact leetcode page that the question was lifted from (with very useful discussion and solutions). Of course most competent companies will ask a minor follow-up which will stump candidates who are relying on such tools.

Sodman 4y ago

I get that it's still a candidates market (especially for strong candidates like OP who can get 11 offers from 13 full attempts), but the spreadsheet of questions you should be asking a company linked in TFA has some eyebrow raising notes and unreasonable expectations imho. For example - there's a big pushback that any hiring manager worried about a candidate who don't have required skills they could learn in 6-12 months is "quibbling". Is this a generally held belief? In the startup space in particular, most folks I interview frequently have consistent < 2 year stints at most if not all of their prior companies. Expecting a 12 month ramp-up time on a particular piece of technology needed to do the job would be an immediate no-hire from me. If I personally joined a company and couldn't meaningfully contribute for the first year, I would consider that a complete failure and expect to be let go. Do other people feel differently? Perhaps this expectation is more applicable to larger companies than startups?

quickthrower2 4y ago
This is why we can’t have nice things. Every company wants to make minimum investment in hires and hires want to jump to get paid as much as possible. Game theory playing out.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Months? Try weeks and even then you should be able to pick up basic things in a week or two.
eulers_secret 4y ago
When I was doing Linux driver dev, it was expected new hires would take 8-12 months to ramp up and start to contribute (usually not well at first). When I asked the Mesa devs how long ramp-up was I was told around 12-18 months. When I was working on ChromeOS we expected about 6 months of ramp. I guess it’s just different projects and jobs at companies. I would never hold my breath to find a candidate that had experience in any of the above.
csomar 4y ago
If you are doing Front-End dev pushing React Components, I think you should ramp-up from Week 1. Some other comment here mentioned this though: some fields it's not possible. If you are doing drivers, kernel, ebpf, or say you are programming Bitcoin main node; you probably need to read a lot before you are able to make any contribution.

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zeroCalories 4y ago

Those are some impressive numbers. While it seems clear that you can get interviews applying through websites and recruiters, I'm amazed by how effective networking is. Any suggestions on how I should manage that? I add people on LinkedIn, but that's about it. Don't really socialize or make friends with people at work.

wikibob 4y ago
The answer is to socialize and make friends at work. People who try to “Network” artificially won’t see great success. People who are genuinely take an interest in what others are doing, and are intentional about meeting once or twice a year for coffee to catch up, are the ones who can call in a favor in the way described in the blog post.
- ghaff 4y ago
  And attend events, make an effort to work with people at partner companies/clients/customers/etc. That's how I've always landed new positions. I've never actually applied for a position since grad school years ago.
gherkinnn 4y ago
> Don’t really socialize or make friends with people at work Well there you have it. No need to be besties, just spend time with people you like. Be it at work or elsewhere. The rest follows.

bubba_sparks 4y ago

I'd rather be tortured by al qaeda than go through all that. I wish someone would write an article on how to hack this process. There's always a back door. Then again if there were I wouldn't be sharing it here.

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propogandist 4y ago
al qaeda means the database, and as with all DBs, it has a backdoor operated by the CIA.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
The back door is being friends with the HM

angarg12 4y ago

I know it's a very touchy subject, but it would be immensely helpful if OP posted numbers about the offers he got. Personally, my compensation is underwater due to the recent stock crash, and leadership has insinuated to expect zilch for 2023. I'm not in the job market due to visa, but I feel the insane comp bubble has burst, and I missed the train. I'm anxious to see how the job market evolves over the next year, but I'm afraid we won't see compensation packages nearly close to how they were the last couple of years.

mhlakhani 4y ago
I agree it's touchy unfortunately. I'm not comfortable sharing in public due to $REASONS, but I have been sharing with friends/family/folks who've been looking. I will say I got offers comparable to my pre-stock crash comp, but I hit a comp cliff either way in 2022 (even without the crash).
- joshka 4y ago
  Would you be fine with sharing the company list?

TimPC 4y ago

You absolutely can prepare for system interviews it’s just some of the best content for doing so is behind paywalls. I opted to buy a course on leetcode covering this topic and my performance before was like night and day. Going through about 20 worked examples each of which has a 45 minute explanation means learning about 60 patterns you can slot into various problems. Once you’ve seen the patterns it’s a lot easier to apply them in different contexts to piece together the system you want.

jacurtis 4y ago
Thats a good endorsement. I've seen those and wondered if they were a waste of time. I think I might consider one now if it was that beneficial. I have no problem paying for educational content. But I was afraid that stuff was just institutional fluff and internal-marketing.
ripley12 4y ago
Yeah, you can also pay to do system design interviewing practice. I did a few paid system design interviews last year (interviewing.io) and found it helpful before a few FAANG interviews.
preciousoo 4y ago
What course did you use, if you don’t mind sharing?
- TimPC 4y ago
  It’s the Code Karle one. The presenter has a thick Indian accent but is still understandable, which I’d probably say was the main negative.
  - lance_klusener 4y ago
    Is there one for leetcode patterns? I googled Code karle and found a site with system design interviews.
    - 4y ago

65 4y ago

This is valuable for corporate software engineers working on giant systems. But what about non-corporate software engineers? What about web developers? The interview process is very different depending on the company.

jstx1 4y ago
> What about web developers? It depends on the company, not on the domain. OP might as well be a web developer, most developers are.

vavooom 4y ago

The list of questions to ask in an interview they provide is quite thoughtful and well organized: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11DoQ-Bhvs5mfRwB0Bz6OHwoChhFVK7u_KqlbFgR-ezY/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11DoQ-Bhvs5mfRwB0Bz6O...

5544ffee 4y ago

> November: Interviews all day erryday What a luxury! I only had 3 weeks of vacation and burned through almost all of it because every company expects you to do multiple rounds of interviews during business hours. Eventually I just quit because it was literally impossible to search for a job while working full time.

mhlakhani 4y ago
I was between jobs so I had the luxury to do this - I wouldn't recommend this heavy a schedule for people who already have a job. It's impossible.
jstx1 4y ago
Even if you have the free time, I'm surprised that they managed to batch the different stages and have all interviews in the same time period. If I'm interviewing, at any given time I'll be sending out resumes, and talking to recruiters, and doing technical interviews, and waiting for feedback asynchronously for different companies.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

> I completed full interview loops at 13 companies and received 11 offers. I'm glad I got the rejections I did - it was clear there wasn't a mutual match. 11 out of 13 seems like a really extremely good hit rate. Even a 50% offer rate would be really good so I'm guessing this person is way better at interviewing than most of us. As most of these interviews were in in October/November I wonder if it would go as well now? Or in 2 or 3 months?

coffeebeqn 4y ago
Seems like we have managed to implement winner take all in Tech interviews too. Of course most people get 0 offers from 13 interviews
mhlakhani 4y ago
I filtered companies down to places where I felt I had a good chance of success, and applied to jobs within my comfort zone - this was a very biased sample. I don't think this generalizes unfortunately
claytonjy 4y ago
13 companies where he completed the entire interview circuit. The further you get in an interview circuit, the more likely you are to continue, and thus to eventually get an offer. Only getting offers from 50% of those might indicate you're doing something surprising towards the end, like coming across as a jerk to the skip-level+ the last interview is usually with.
angarg12 4y ago
I suspect you'd be able to land fewer interviews if you repeated this experience now. However the most interesting stat is missing: compensation offers. I bet offers being handed today are across the board lower than even just 1 quarter ago.
Falkon1313 4y ago
That's 11 out of 35. A 31% hit rate. Still not bad. Being more selective (3 to 5 places instead of 35) could've maybe gotten a 75%+ hit rate (but also might've missed the best one).

5544ffee 4y ago

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Topgamer7 4y ago

The very first link in the blog post to another blog post is missing /blog at the start of the data.

mhlakhani 4y ago
whoops - will fix, thank you!

abdullahkhalids 4y ago

In the job market right now. I have a question about talking to recruiters. I am talking to a couple of them, who are working with companies whose name or location they won't even disclose until the company looks at my CV and decides to move ahead. But the recruiters want me to specify a salary expectation. But my salary expectations depend on whether I am living in the downtown of large city or in a smaller city, or able to work remotely. What number do I specify, or how do I approach the situation otherwise?

mhlakhani 4y ago
I've generally had bad experiences with third party recruiters so I try to avoid them when I can. in your position I'd probably be upfront and mention the ranges you are OK with in the different situations.
Cypher 4y ago
The trick is to give a range where the low end is one you're happy with and top end is of the jobs who you're going for. At the end of the day it's a filter and not the be all end all that you'll accept when negotiating time comes.
pandaman 4y ago
Tell them you are working with the other recruiters so if they don't want to double-submit (which invalidates the candidate in most cases unless the resume is so good the company does not mind paying double commission) they will have to tell you which companies they are submitting to. If they still refuse to tell - they don't work with anybody and just submit you to any open job ad they can find, you can do the same yourself with a lower chance of screwing up (e.g. the aforementioned double submission or the company explicitly rejecting any representation).
kurizu4444 4y ago
It is okay to change your salary expectations as you uncover more information about the job
fijiaarone 4y ago
Quote a really high number and then don’t return their calls.

coding123 4y ago

I try not to burn my referrals all at once. Nothing wrong with that, but I tend to do applications with places where I am referred one at a time. Otherwise I'll feel like I'm turning down a friend should the place make an offer.

the_jends 4y ago

I think this write up is a good resource for those who got called into at least an interview. I wonder how does one improve if the rejections come even before a single interview? At that stage companies typically will not give you any reason for the rejection either for legal reasons or simply convenience. This leaves you hesitating whether to apply to other companies for fear they will reject you for the same unknown reason. Maybe someone who has been in the other side of equation can explain, what are the common reasons would get someone discarded before an interview and is there really no way to communicate those better to the rejectee?

jacurtis 4y ago
This is almost impossible to answer because there are so many reasons that it could be. But I've been hiring manager and looked through thousands of resumes/CVs and hired about 50-60 engineers. 1. Far under-qualified. People apply for senior positions with literally 18 months of experience ALL THE TIME. Seriously... ALL THE TIME. 2. Too many technologies on your CV. A lot of resumes will just list every language or technology on the planet. Its a shotgun technique to just list everything and hope something sticks. The problem with this is that you can't be good at everything. When you say you are confident or even expert in 30 different languages, then it just tells me I can't trust anything on your resume. 3. Titles that don't make sense. Your titles at companies should be standard. Don't put "Javascript Ninja Pro II". Wtf is that? Just put "Software Engineer II - Javascript". Also, in the vein of job titles that don't make sense is someone who worked as a junior engineer for 6 months, and then their next job is as a Senior level engineer. This is scary common, seriously. You're either lying or delusional, either way I'm moving to the next CV. 4. Colorful resumes. Resumes should be text documents. A colored line below a header or little highlights are fine, but its not a graphics design job. Cutesy resumes just make me worried that someone is overcompensating or hasn't been in the industry enough. A lot of cute resumes have tons of whitespace and design to take up space and make a light resume fill fuller. These resumes are super common with bootcamp grads. Maybe bootcamps are selling resume templates as art projects. Don't know, don't care. Usually a well qualified engineer will want a text dense resume so they have more space to brag about all the amazing things they have accomplished. If youre using space for fancy designs then you probably don't have enough content on your resume. It's essentially wasted opportunity. 5. Resumes with Personal Photos. DO NOT EVERY SUBMIT A RESUME WITH YOUR PHOTO ON IT. I have a rule that I automatically reject any resume with someone's photo. It's too risky. I can either get accused of favoring a certain race/gender/ethnicity/etc or being prejudiced against them. So instead I automatically reject any resume with a personal photo. You can be the worlds best engineer and you won't get a call back from me because you added a personal photo on your resume. A lot of companies have this rule too. So if you are adding your photo to your resume you are doing far more harm than good to yourself. 6. Too long. Most resumes should be 2 pages. If you are just getting into the industry and only have < 3 jobs then you should use 1 page. If you are a veteran than use 3 pages. Never go above 3 pages. Anything above 3 pages will get cut. Three pages is enough to give even a staff-level engineer plenty of space to talk about their accomplishments. Anything more than that is an autobiography and I don't have time for it. Learn to cut fluff and give me your greatest hits on a resume. You are just trying to get an interview. You'll have HOURS in far-too-long interview process to give us your verbal autobiography. Save the greatest hits for the resume/CV. 7. Pattern of short job history. Some companies might not care. But if you have a consistent pattern of only working somewhere for 6 months (again, very common) then it tells me you are just job hoping. I know the saying that this is the best way to get a raise in tech. But if youve had 4 jobs in 2 years then I won't waste my time. It will take you 6 months to even start to provide value at the company, and i don't want to be replacing your position twice a year. Im fine with a single job that has a short stint. Just as long as its not a pattern of behavior. Its really common to get resumes with engineers that have 6-8 jobs and only 3 years of experience (Its very common). I'm not delusional enough to believe that our company will be the one you stick around with. So I move on from this. As long as you have an average pattern of at least a year with jobs, then you're fine. If you worked contract, this is different and you should list that in the job description. 8. No good bullet points. With each job you should list things you accomplished. "Built the website using Javascript and React" is not an accomplishment. If you don't have specific accomplishments to list and everything about each job is superficial, then I will assume your contributions at the company were superficial. 9. No Progress on Resume. Your resume should tell a story. If I look at someone who has worked somewhere for 3 years and didn't get a title change or promotion during that time, then I get worried that they aren't providing good quality work. Good engineers get promotions. I'd expect to see that story as I read down your resume. If you look stagnant then the resume will get tossed. 10. No Clear Direction. I want to see that someone is looking for a specific type of job or they are pointing their career in a certain direction. This is visible by the content on the resume being focused in one area or direction and the pattern of jobs taken. I see a lot of resumes where people take a job as an ETL Engineer for 18 months. Then they are a full stack engineer for 12 months. Then they get into sysadmin work for 12 months and now apply for Backend Java. If you have legit reasons for meandering in your career then it should be in your cover letter or explained in 1-2 brief sentences at the top. Stuff that doesn't matter. - Your home address, not sure why people put this on there. I'm not going to knock on your door to schedule an interview. I'll get your address if/when you're hired. - Photos. Its a engineering or tech job, not a modeling gig. See #5, these automatically get cut by most companies for risk of subconscious bias. - Mission Statement. Sure put a sentence or two if you want. But "Get a job in software engineering" is not a mission. If that's all you have to say then leave it off. Mission statement is not going to have any impact positive or negative on you getting a job. So why bother having it there. - Jokes. You're not going to get hired because of a joke and its really hard to tell whether stuff is a joke or you're just crazy when its on a resume. You're not lightening the mood, you are confusing the hiring manager. When a hiring manager gets confused while looking at the resume, the resume goes in the trash. So jokes are only going to hurt you. - Typos. I don't immediately dismiss resumes for a single typo. But more than 3+ and I probably will. Its easy enough to use spell check. If there are typos it is because you rushed the resume-building, have no attention to detail, or just don't care. One or two typos are fine. But a pattern is concerning.

listenallyall 4y ago

> After leaving Meta recently That's all I needed to hear. Back in the day, the college you went to opened (or shut) doors to get interviews. And most people, who did not attend an Ivy League school or similar, rejected the concept as being anti-meritocratic. However, today, it's the same thing -- just replace college with the company(ies) you list on your resume. A shitty programmer with a bad attitude from Meta, Google, etc. is far more likely to get opportunities than the best programmer in the entire insurance industry, or the person who wrote the greatest dry-cleaner management software. It's quite unfortunate.

dan-robertson 4y ago
Would the person who wrote the best dry-cleaner management software do well at a company like Google? That is, I think a lot of the required skills there are ‘getting things done in a company the size of Google’ and having worked at Meta for a few years is perhaps a better signal for that than having made some great software. Likewise someone from Google may have a harder time in some startup where the structure is different and they don’t have all the fancy google tools or services. To be clear, I don’t want to imply that someone who makes great dry cleaner management software is a bad programmer or that they couldn’t be successful at Google or that Google look at the right signals and have good processes or that the startups who should have a different hiring strategy don’t copy google too much.
- listenallyall 4y ago
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  - j-bos 4y ago
    Your point can be made with more civility.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    Yeah, so one thing that is pretty naturally frustrating is that hiring processes are incredibly unfair in the sense that perceived quality of candidates by the process is often wildly unrelated to how they would perform at the job and, in particular, the processes often rate poorly many candidates who would make excellent hires. This unfairness does not feel good but I think it would be worse to require companies to be fair (likely their definition of fairness would be bad and processes would converge more meaning all companies were competing for exactly the same candidates) and it is reasonable for companies for these processes to be unfair as their goal is to hire N candidates who meet their bar, rather than to find all candidates who meet their bar and randomly select N of them. I do think it is bad for companies but I think it’s bad that the processes are ineffective (ie missing excellent candidates; overpaying for mid candidates due to competing with everyone else for the same people) rather than because they are unfair. One thing to note about the article is the person seems to have had some reasonable variation in interview process between companies. Perhaps if the hypothetical dry cleaner management software maker applied to a company that did work-sample tests, they would get a chance to shine by being good at programming and taking feedback and working on actual problems independently for example, even if they didn’t do a good job at passing the candidate screen or doing ‘algorithms’ at a more traditional company.

m0llusk 4y ago

Ninety minutes to do a thing. Evaluations are hard, but that barely relates to my experience as an engineer in any way. Couldn't they ask in detail about previous work instead?

charlie0 4y ago

Don't feel bad if you're doing everything listed in the article and still failing. One look at this person's resume and it answered everything. This is not your average Software Dev. and they have 10 yrs experience. Keep grinding my friends, you'll get there.

langsoul-com 4y ago

Lots of this advice is great for very senior people, they're a lot market. Anyone below really doesn't have the same luxury to be so picky and choosey. I've applied for hundreds of jobs, most rejected without a phone or interview call. Shit is tough. Ain't got no leeway.

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