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I like take home better but only if the test is a sensible assessment of my capabilities to convert specs to code. Recently I did two HackerRank challanges as part of interviewing and that was a complete waste of time, very narrow and I don't work well under time pressure while solving either math problems or library implementations I explicitly said I did not work with.
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Jan 28, 2020 15:22
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speaking of which i just received a code test (read: a codility link) for a job i applied for a little while ago and i am legitimately considering just not clicking the link just to save myself the mental anguish. i know for a fact i'm not going to pass anyway, so i'll just keep studying this stuff so that i can apply again in 6mo-1y. it blows that this is a necessary part of trying to move up in my career when this will be of barely any use in my actual work and i could be using this time to study meaningful stuff. e: please forgive the drama, i'm just not in a very good place of mind regarding my career. i feel like my impostor syndrome wasn't impostor syndrome after all
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Jan 28, 2020 15:34
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Oh, but it always is...
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Jan 28, 2020 18:17
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JawnV6 posted:I can expand a little. I have interviewed folks that would have come in as my boss. My input to the process wasn't all that significant (most got hung up on 'how do we get a blue chip exec to work for this dinky startup') but the interviews themselves were fine. Less technical grilling, more behavioral style questions. If you're concerned about keeping ownership of one area you can phrase it as a behavioral question, "This role will be a technical lead but the design is still under my purview. Can you describe a time in your career that a peer or subordinate had clear ownership of an area and how did you manage that?" or the broader "How have you dealt with a decision from another org/peer that you did not agree with?" that might tease out how they'd handle your design edicts. This is excellent, thank you. I think I’m fixated on the ownership/command chain dev/design interplay because it got so screwed up at my previous job (and was one of many reasons why I left). Getting viewed and treated as a mediocre codemonkey by a cocky new hire after having designed pretty much the entire frontend didn’t feel that great. Didn’t help that management let this fucker walk all over me and didn’t listen when I pointed out his horrible markup/CSS and sloppy UI implementations. Good riddance. Thankfully at my current company, design is highly regarded and is an important driver in how the software platform is developed. So we need to select for someone who doesn’t have a huge ego about what he/she gets to be in charge of and respects and appreciates the design part of the process. quote:I like whiteboards v0v. In a stunning coincidence, I do well at them. Show up with nothing, leave at the end of the on-site, done and done. With a take-home you have to ensure you're not selecting for "who had the most free time on a weekend" or outright fraud. There's ways for any process to go off the rails, as long as you're aware of them that's the best you can hope for. Other than not liking doing whiteboard stuff as an interviewee, I’m worried about having to administer it, especially in the area of backend skills, which I’m not very familiar with and would probably not do a good job evaluating (I’d also have to cram). I’m hoping to be able to do something along the lines of asking for explanation of some higher level process or concept, and then provide the whiteboard in case they need it to illustrate their points. Inacio posted:no degree and not enough years under my belt means i'm basically his slut and he's doing me a favor by hiring me That’s all unbelievably hosed up. Inacio posted:speaking of which i just received a code test (read: a codility link) for a job i applied for a little while ago and i am legitimately considering just not clicking the link just to save myself the mental anguish. I don’t think there’s any more harm in taking it and bombing it than not taking it - might as well v  vI’ve been in your shoes (and still am in a lot of ways). One of the huge reasons I stayed at my previous crappy underpaying job for way too long is because I didn’t think I’d be able to pass any sort of technical interview. I honestly kind of lucked out with my current job - I got pulled in by the CEO based on a strong recommendation and she sort of foisted me off on the dev team for a fast tracked interview. She made it sound like the take home assignment was optional (I think because she was primarily interested in my design background), but I took it anyway because I felt that declining it would look bad. The interview was otherwise pretty high level discussion (which I could handle) and no whiteboarding or timed tests or anything. Based on that experience, I’ve been seriously upping my networking game because that seems like the key to bypassing a lot of the super technical (and overly difficult and stressful for me) aspects of the interview process.
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Jan 28, 2020 18:35
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Xarn posted:I find it interesting that the other person who likes whiteboards is Jawn, who IIRC is a hardware guy, while our two posters who don't like them are both front end devs. Queen Victorian posted:I think I’m fixated on the ownership/command chain dev/design interplay because it got so screwed up at my previous job (and was one of many reasons why I left). Getting viewed and treated as a mediocre codemonkey by a cocky new hire after having designed pretty much the entire frontend didn’t feel that great. Didn’t help that management let this fucker walk all over me and didn’t listen when I pointed out his horrible markup/CSS and sloppy UI implementations. Good riddance. Queen Victorian posted:Other than not liking doing whiteboard stuff as an interviewee, I’m worried about having to administer it, especially in the area of backend skills, which I’m not very familiar with and would probably not do a good job evaluating (I’d also have to cram). I’m hoping to be able to do something along the lines of asking for explanation of some higher level process or concept, and then provide the whiteboard in case they need it to illustrate their points.
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Jan 28, 2020 19:17
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Inacio posted:speaking of which i just received a code test (read: a codility link) for a job i applied for a little while ago and i am legitimately considering just not clicking the link just to save myself the mental anguish.  it's a javascript position
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Jan 28, 2020 20:26
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Inacio posted:
What. So I looked at the demo landing page you linked, and JavaScript was allowed there. So it can handle JS but it’s been excluded from your test. Wtf.
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Jan 28, 2020 20:34
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Also, no functional languages listed. Welcome to the future, folks.
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Jan 28, 2020 20:58
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gbut posted:Also, no functional languages listed. Welcome to the future, folks. You mean no purely functional languages. Meaning Haskell? Are there jobs that require Haskell? Do companie sin general even employ people that can judge a Haskell codility entry?
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Jan 28, 2020 21:07
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Yes, but also functional first languages. (I missed scala at first). Not seeing lisp up there is kinda disappointing. I don't expect Idris or elm to be there, but clojure? It's not a small language. I was obviously being facetious in my original comment. But I guess that their list represents the reality of web being run on WordPress. (Also, apologies for sounding like a dick. I guess my sa humor doesn't fly in these tech subforums, so I keep rubbing people the wrong way. Noted, will try to sound less like a dick) gbut fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jan 28, 2020 |
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Jan 28, 2020 21:14
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kayakyakr posted:So when you reach your mid 30's your career either takes one of two paths: architect/high-end IC role where you're deeply embedded in a codebase, or management. It sounds like this move boils down to the question, what interests you more? Do you want to be a manager someday and have a team of reports that either love or hate you, or do you want to get crusty and nerdy with code? kayakyakr posted:Personally, if I was as early/late in my career as you are, I'd take it because $$ and title makes you more mobile in case things go to poo poo. And if you don't like it, then you're in a much better position to move after.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:07
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Volguus posted:Are there jobs that require Haskell? Not many but not none. Facebook, Target and Bloomberg all have systems that are written in Haskell, and you can expect that to leak out into the larger ecosystem over time.
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Jan 29, 2020 00:57
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gbut posted:Yes, but also functional first languages. (I missed scala at first). Not seeing lisp up there is kinda disappointing. I don't expect Idris or elm to be there, but clojure? It's not a small language.
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Jan 29, 2020 05:40
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Queen Victorian posted:Based on that experience, I’ve been seriously upping my networking game because that seems like the key to bypassing a lot of the super technical (and overly difficult and stressful for me) aspects of the interview process. If you're not afraid of public speaking, this has helped quite a bit with this for me. I've had interviewers start out with "I saw your talk at $recent_conference" and rather than go into whiteboarding, we'd just shoot the poo poo about the talk I gave, while they made sure I wasn't a jerk that nobody would want to work with. I think I've said this before in this thread but I'd reiterate that speaking is literally career rocket fuel. Both in terms of enhancing your value within your current company, and if your company can't see that, it also helps build a network and show your skills for getting a better next job. kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Jan 29, 2020 |
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Jan 29, 2020 06:18
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Eh, I did the speaking thing and it got me precisely zero traction at oldjob. I work at google now which is nice and all, but I don't think that had anything to do with my speaking stuff
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Jan 29, 2020 06:30
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Inacio posted:
At my employer, a line manager will ask HR to create the Codility test, and unless they remember to specify it, the HR person will guess based on the ad text what languages go on the test. We had a position open for a Java/JS fullstack engineer with some experience, and got three candidates in a row who took the test in C++ and didn't know know JS to save their lives. Yeah, I don't have the best confidence in our recruitment methods. Some of those candidates did score really well on Codility, but we suspect one of them had bought his answers somewhere. The nice thing about those tests is that you can track every input the user does on a timeline, and they're encouraged to type straight into the web form and not in a external IDE. So, when someone sits with a blank page for 20 minutes, then pastes in a perfectly scoring answer, it doesn't look good. He still got called to the interview because no one looked at his answers until after the interview. Waste of time. I love seeing a good candidate reason through a problem by reading the code they write. The mistakes and assumptions they make, and how they recover, are more important than having a perfect solution in the end.
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Jan 29, 2020 09:42
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:The nice thing about those tests is that you can track every input the user does on a timeline, and they're encouraged to type straight into the web form and not in a external IDE. So, when someone sits with a blank page for 20 minutes, then pastes in a perfectly scoring answer, it doesn't look good. This seems real creepy. Does the site advise the candidate they are tracking everything they are doing? I mean, Ive been to an interview where I cast a laptop to a big screen for them to watch as I solve the problem, but that's in person where it's all clear and obvious what's going on. A take home where you are recorded is something I think I would just take a pass on. I also think it's the asymmetry of the situation that bothers me...
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Jan 29, 2020 10:57
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:The nice thing about those tests is that you can track every input the user does on a timeline, and they're encouraged to type straight into the web form and not in a external IDE. So, when someone sits with a blank page for 20 minutes, then pastes in a perfectly scoring answer, it doesn't look good. """nice"""
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Jan 29, 2020 11:44
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:Some of those candidates did score really well on Codility, but we suspect one of them had bought his answers somewhere. The nice thing about those tests is that you can track every input the user does on a timeline, and they're encouraged to type straight into the web form and not in a external IDE. So, when someone sits with a blank page for 20 minutes, then pastes in a perfectly scoring answer, it doesn't look good. Do you have screening calls or anything? The frauds are usually pretty easy to pick out at that stage.
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Jan 29, 2020 11:45
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:At my employer, a line manager will ask HR to create the Codility test, and unless they remember to specify it, the HR person will guess based on the ad text what languages go on the test. We had a position open for a Java/JS fullstack engineer with some experience, and got three candidates in a row who took the test in C++ and didn't know know JS to save their lives. Have you considered that they could have said  to not using their environment they already had set up on the machine they were performing the code test?It’s cool that you think it’s more plausible they bought an answer. I’m assuming that means you know where to buy one?
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Jan 29, 2020 12:08
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leper khan posted:Have you considered that they could have said Codility is huge. You can find a lot of their answers from a simple google search. Some of the questions we used weren't on any of the sites I found, and I don't know where to buy the missing ones, but I'm not naive enough to think they are not available on some corner of the 'net. As for the environment, of course it's possible someone would refuse to use the browser based one, but the test instructions say to type in the window and if they don't want to take the test, they don't have to take the job. Their development environment is actually really good, with code completion and everything. Plus, they provide a few test cases that you can run with a click of a button. If you're the kind of programmer who says "no thanks, I'm not going to run the tests you provide me, I'll take my chances", then I'm not sure I want to hire you. Hippie Hedgehog fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 29, 2020 12:49
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Do employees at that company also have to deal with this in their day to day work, or is it just done in order to give candidates a bad impression?
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Jan 29, 2020 13:16
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:the test instructions say to type in the window and if they don't want to take the test, they don't have to take the job If I write "if you don't want to send a $50 kickback, you don't have to take the job" on my submission form, it does not magically make asking for a kickback reasonable quote:If you're the kind of programmer who says "no thanks, I'm not going to run the tests you provide me If only it were possible to paste the answers in and then run the tests! But alas and alack, 'tis but a dream!
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Jan 29, 2020 15:17
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Progressive JPEG posted:Do employees at that company also have to deal with this in their day to day work, or is it just done in order to give candidates a bad impression? It's cleverly designed to weed out programmers who won't tolerate bureaucratic interference in their work
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Jan 29, 2020 15:41
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Achmed Jones posted:Eh, I did the speaking thing and it got me precisely zero traction at oldjob. I work at google now which is nice and all, but I don't think that had anything to do with my speaking stuff I think the public speaking thing can help get the job as long as you treat the interview like public speaking with an audience of one. Speak clearly, confidently, and be engaging. You've still got to do well on the technical stuff, but the difference between someone quietly mumbling through an interview and someone confidently articulating their thought process can easily be the difference between hire/no-hire.
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Jan 29, 2020 16:07
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Sure, Jose, you're not wrong there. We were taking about presenting as a short-circuit through (or at least a significant factor in) interview/promo processes though.
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Jan 29, 2020 16:12
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How do you get into giving talks anyways? I’d like to do one this year.
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Jan 29, 2020 16:57
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lifg posted:How do you get into giving talks anyways? I’d like to do one this year. I'm not sure how you go to the conferences, but I know that all the local coding groups are constantly looking for people to give presentations. Also have seen a lot of success with monthly internal company presentations being a good place to start when designing and testing out a talk.
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Jan 29, 2020 17:36
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I would say that public speaking is definitely growing my network more than anything else. I expect this to make the next job search easier, but I am doing it for fun either way. 
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Jan 29, 2020 18:18
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lifg posted:How do you get into giving talks anyways? I’d like to do one this year. Local meetups are definitely the first place I'd start, low risk high reward for first time folks. Even once you're more experienced, they're also a good place to test/fine tune a talk you want to give more widely. Having run a local meetup I can safely say your average meetup is dying for speakers, and so long as you're not trying to do a sales pitch in disguise they'll welcome you with open arms. Also check out CFP aggregators like https://www.papercall.io/events and just submit submit submit. Do not be discouraged if you get rejections, it's entirely a numbers game. Even experienced well-known speakers I know end up often getting 5-10 rejections for every acceptance. I've been on the content committee for a conference or two and helped organize a couple myself, and 99% of the time if you get a rejection it is nothing personal about you. They're trying to balance a content track and that means they'll turn down excellent talks. A good conference talk submission is short and sweet (a paragraph or two at max) that explains the content, and sandwiches it between the reasons why I should see your talk. - describe the reason for why your talk is important, in a sentence or two ("As a new engineering manager or team lead, learning to give effective feedback is one of the hardest challenges you'll face") - summarize your talk ("We'll describe what actionable feedback looks like, what less useful feedback looks like, and how to communicate critical feedback to your team.") - describe what I'll walk out with at the end ("You'll leave this conference with a working template for sharing positive and critical feedback to help get you started.") When it's time to actually prep your talk I'd say it's a safe bet you'll spend an hour of prep work for every minute of actual talk content, so it's in your interest to amortize that effort by having a talk topic you can repeat at multiple conferences.
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Jan 29, 2020 19:16
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kitten smoothie posted:I think I've said this before in this thread but I'd reiterate that speaking is literally career rocket fuel. Both in terms of enhancing your value within your current company, and if your company can't see that, it also helps build a network and show your skills for getting a better next job. My wife does a lot of travel to conferences, gives talks there and networks. She is also present on twitter with a couple of thousand followers, all in tech. She is asked to interview for amazing jobs regularly. The above is true.
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Jan 29, 2020 20:17
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lifg posted:How do you get into giving talks anyways? I’d like to do one this year. I'm in a technology biased Toastmasters group and people are always announcing conferences accepting proposals for talks.
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Jan 29, 2020 20:54
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lifg posted:How do you get into giving talks anyways? I’d like to do one this year. You do something and then submit it to conferences. Alternately, you just submit without doing something and then do the thing when you're accepted, but that's more of a "let's talk about oauth/testing/whatever" situation and my talks were "I made this attack tool/I did this threat analysis and here are the results" ]which sometimes don't pan out because you need to do the analysis to know if it's interesting. On the creating tools front, I guess you _could_ submit the talk proposal before writing the code but that sounds like a recipe for failure to me. Much better to write the code and then release it publicly as part of your talk. To find out where to submit it, search "$FIELD cfp". I do infosec stuff, so there's a few website that list upcoming CFPs (call-for-paper/proposal). The main things are: 1. Trust the committee to reject you, don't reject yourself. Maybe you don't think your talk is that great, but let them reject you. "gently caress it, just submit" is a great motto. 2. Don't lie in your abstract. If you do, and you submit "MITMing http traffic to steal TLS during insecure creation" as "breaking TLS," lots of people will be mad at you when your talk isn't what they expect and will dunk on you for the rest of the con (and god help you if your resume ever comes across their desk)
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Jan 30, 2020 00:48
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lifg posted:How do you get into giving talks anyways? I’d like to do one this year. As someone speaking at a conference for the first time in March: file the forms with the conference when they post that they’re looking. Then reasonably address feedback from the people representing the conference. First step is transforming your thinking from: “I’d like to give a talk” to “I’d like to give a talk to the audience at <conference> on <topic>”
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Jan 30, 2020 00:58
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Achmed Jones posted:If I write "if you don't want to send a $50 kickback, you don't have to take the job" on my submission form, it does not magically make asking for a kickback reasonable For some reason, our other candidates all thought it was perfectly reasonable to work in a well-designed tiny IDE with pre-made test cases. Who knows what kind of drugs they must have been on! Achmed Jones posted:If only it were possible to paste the answers in and then run the tests! But alas and alack, 'tis but a dream! Progressive JPEG posted:Do employees at that company also have to deal with this in their day to day work, or is it just done in order to give candidates a bad impression? Well, we do code reviews, so... I honestly didn't expect this to be a controversial recruitment tool, considering how bad most of the others are (see: this thread). At least this one is transparent, comparable, relevant to the work, time saving to employees, and does a decent job of validating that their resumé is not just bullshit. Hippie Hedgehog fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 09:49
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:I don't even understand what you're trying to get at. Having people pay money to get a job seems stupid, but I know it happens in the U.S. If nothing else, that's what internships are: but you pay by working for free. Which is illegal, here. I think paying for a job would also be illegal somehow but don't quote me on that. Anyway, I'm pretty sure no one would apply for the job with the job market being the way it is. His point is that saying "if you don't like X, you don't have to take the job!" does not make unreasonable values of X any less unreasonable. Hippie Hedgehog posted:Well, we do code reviews, so... Sure, but presumably your developers get to write code in their editor of choice before submitting the code for review? I've seen so many bad web IDEs that it seems completely reasonable for applicants to want to use their own editor. Haven't used Codility, but even if the editor is great, maybe the candidate was accustomed to a different set of key bindings. Depending on the difficulty of the question, it's not implausible that they would answer correctly on the first try. In this case it sounds like they did cheat, but in general, I imagine that immediately rejecting pasted code will lose you some qualified applicants.
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Jan 30, 2020 10:18
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I'm the development manager at my company and handle hiring devs, and I think Codility is a decent tool. I don't mark people down if they just paste answers into the IDE, as I know some people are happier writing code in other tools and pasting it in, but if they make it to the face to face I ask them about what they thought of the questions and how they went about solving them. It's pretty obvious at that point if they just found the answer online.
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Jan 30, 2020 11:07
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A variation of slightly expoitative take home exams is where you have to add something to their "community" as your take home. For instance one site that lets you write JS games in browser has an application process where you're supposed to join their Discord and share the game you wrote on their site. No thanks!
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Feb 2, 2020 00:21
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If you play a critical ownership role in cutting $10M from your company's operating cash outflows over the next Fiscal Year, how high of a building do you jump off of when the company says they can only offer you their standard, single-digit % cap on raises and bonuses; and that you have no alternative to negotiate with because you can't win the algorithm lottery? asking for a friend because the building they're moving into next month is only a few stories but the one next to it is pretty tall actually i'm kidding, it's just a way to cope
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Feb 2, 2020 00:36
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It's yotj for that person, that's what it is
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Feb 2, 2020 00:40
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