|
Sistergodiva posted:I really like my company and I am fighting with the feeling of getting screwed over on one hand and feeling responsible for us making it through this crisis. Honestly, there's just a lot of this going around right now due to the pandemic, and there's no one answer to the question. I'd talk to your managers about pulling in another person or two to keep up your billables while allowing you and your coworker to lower your commitments.
|
#
?
May 21, 2020 14:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 05:33 |
|
|
ChickenWing posted:Honestly, there's just a lot of this going around right now due to the pandemic, and there's no one answer to the question. I'd talk to your managers about pulling in another person or two to keep up your billables while allowing you and your coworker to lower your commitments. Yeah, this is totally what we would have done if it was possible. Though even getting us two access to every system, signing NDAs etc took over a month, and getting someone onboarded without face2face would probably be hard. I guess I just wanted to vent. I mean I know that legally I have no obligation to work more than what my contract says, but I also think I jeopardize our relationship with this huge client. Oh well, at least I am working for home so I can play animal crossing or draw while listening to unimportant presentations/meetings.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2020 14:36
|
|
|
Perhaps ask your employer for a way to show their gratitude financially in a year when things are better, such as stock options that vest a year out?
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2020 17:08
|
|
|
Is there any interviewing-as-a-service that isn't a waste of money and won't piss off the candidates? I'm leading a three-person team and we need to evaluate for skills we don't have. Plus it takes a lot of time and we're not very good at it. But outsourcing this seems like a lovely thing that we won't be able to trust and will turn people off. I'm guessing we should just suck it up and do the best we can but I'm curious if there's any alternative that isn't a terrible idea.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2020 19:22
|
|
|
SurgicalOntologist posted:Is there any interviewing-as-a-service that isn't a waste of money and won't piss off the candidates? I'm leading a three-person team and we need to evaluate for skills we don't have. Plus it takes a lot of time and we're not very good at it. But outsourcing this seems like a lovely thing that we won't be able to trust and will turn people off. I'm guessing we should just suck it up and do the best we can but I'm curious if there's any alternative that isn't a terrible idea. in my experience that depends a lot on what you're interviewing for
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2020 19:29
|
|
|
The only time I’ve seen it is when I was recruited/contacting through Tek Systems. They gave me a hard and really fiddly test for Perl, and passed along my results to companies.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2020 19:40
|
|
|
SurgicalOntologist posted:Is there any interviewing-as-a-service that isn't a waste of money and won't piss off the candidates? I'm leading a three-person team and we need to evaluate for skills we don't have. Plus it takes a lot of time and we're not very good at it. But outsourcing this seems like a lovely thing that we won't be able to trust and will turn people off. I'm guessing we should just suck it up and do the best we can but I'm curious if there's any alternative that isn't a terrible idea. I wouldn't completely outsource hiring, that seems like a disaster. Do you have 3rd party recruiters you know and trust? I've worked with some who've done a great job getting me those types of candidates then I just need to do interviews to confirm and make sure their is a fit. Finding a good recruiter is a whole thing unto itself though, a crappy one will try to just offload people to you if they know you won't know the difference.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2020 19:42
|
|
|
Not yet, but we should probably start looking for a trusted recruiter.
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2020 14:39
|
|
|
SurgicalOntologist posted:Is there any interviewing-as-a-service that isn't a waste of money and won't piss off the candidates? I'm leading a three-person team and we need to evaluate for skills we don't have. Plus it takes a lot of time and we're not very good at it. But outsourcing this seems like a lovely thing that we won't be able to trust and will turn people off. I'm guessing we should just suck it up and do the best we can but I'm curious if there's any alternative that isn't a terrible idea. My small company with a very small dev team has pretty much the same predicament - lead dev with all the backend knowledge got poached. Those of us left on the team are frontend and not well equipped to evaluate for a senior full stack/backend position (or data science/engineering). Our solution was to hire out the technical screen but continue to handle all other aspects of the interviewing process ourselves. We still do initial phone screens and then later stage behavioral interviews. So far it’s worked out pretty well, even though I had misgivings at first. The other steps still take up a lot of our time, but it’s much better for both the candidates and us to be heavily involved, and I’d rather we take the time to identify a good candidate than to rush/outsource and end up with a bad hire (seriously, one bad hire can completely poison a small team). The candidate’s technical chops are only part of the equation at the end of the day, anyway. We did try utilizing recruiters’ technical screens at first, but that gave us a pile of candidates that ranged from underwhelming to garbage. And a University of Phoenix MBA that one time. I know there are better recruiters out there, though. If you want to go this route, it really depends on the quality of the recruiter and their screening methods. Overall, interviewing-as-a-service seems like a bad idea on multiple levels: you come off as unable/unwilling to give your candidates the time of day, as you’ve shunted them off to a third party, you’re missing out on evaluating important aspects you are able to discern yourself (i.e. is the candidate a sexist prick or not, do we actually get along with this person), and the candidate doesn’t get as much of a chance to evaluate your company and the prospect of working there. As for not being very good at interviewing, I’ve been conducting interviews and I’m definitely not good at it. What helps is practice and tag-teaming with someone else who’s better at it, even if they aren’t as knowledgeable about the particular skills you’re looking at.
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2020 16:08
|
|
|
I would probably turn the company down if they outsourced the interviewing. If you need to assess technical skills which nobody at the company has, I would give the candidates a take-home challenge (make sure they have time to complete it and make sure it won't take more than 2-3 hours if they're adding tests and polishing it up as best they can) then outsource the evaluation of that challenge by using a contractor or something. It's not that you don't have the skills needed to _interview_ the person, you just lack the technical skills so try to limit the outsourcing to that.
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2020 16:14
|
|
|
Slimy Hog posted:I would probably turn the company down if they outsourced the interviewing. Designing a test that only takes 2-3 hours requires familiarity with the skills involved.
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2020 16:21
|
|
|
ultrafilter posted:Designing a test that only takes 2-3 hours requires familiarity with the skills involved.  I'm a dummy
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2020 16:57
|
|
|
Sistergodiva posted:Yeah, not sure if it was clear, but I am a full time employee at my work, but I am working at our client as a consultant. 
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 04:17
|
|
|
If I get a sniff that a company is outsourcing interviewing, I bail. This has only happened once and it wasn't a job I was super excited for, so it was really easy to just treat this as a red flag of things to come. Also, if you have make me take a 30 minute 'coding test' on a website that lacks simple Intellisense, let alone features of an actual IDE, then I will also immediately bail.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 06:41
|
|
|
Canine Blues Arooo posted:Also, if you have make me take a 30 minute 'coding test' on a website that lacks simple Intellisense, let alone features of an actual IDE, then I will also immediately bail. I didn't get that job, and felt like it was because I was a bad coder (one of my first interviews, remember), but in retrospect I definitely dodged a bullet there.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 12:27
|
|
|
I don’t understand that at all. If you were hiring a woodworker would you assess their chair-building skills without tools? I mean, whiteboard an algorithm like FizzBuzz, sure. But more than like a dozen lines of code, just no, sit me down with a proper IDE.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 14:56
|
|
|
Protocol7 posted:I don’t understand that at all. If you were hiring a woodworker would you assess their chair-building skills without tools? You have one hour to build a chair using a bread knife, go go go!
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 15:41
|
|
|
It somewhat makes sense in that you don't have to worry about janitoring a device, especially decades ago when IDEs were a lot more primitive. I had this exact discussion years ago at my last job about why we still used whiteboards for coding instead of a sacrificial laptop. I'm glad that the industry is slowly moving along with the times but from the other end it's still not great.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 15:56
|
|
|
I remember one time they handed me a laptop to do the coding exercise on and it was a loving Mac so I knew precisely none of the keyboard shortcuts. "Uh. How do you bring up the Dev Console? This keyboard doesn't have an F12 key." They also forgot to revert the previous candidate's changes and immediately snatched the laptop away from me
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 16:02
|
|
|
I've used the pair coding piece of HackerRank on a few phone interviews and it worked pretty well. My biggest suggestion to our recruiting team has been to get a few burner laptops to be able to do it in person.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 16:52
|
|
|
CPColin posted:I remember one time they handed me a laptop to do the coding exercise on and it was a loving Mac so I knew precisely none of the keyboard shortcuts. "Uh. How do you bring up the Dev Console? This keyboard doesn't have an F12 key."
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 17:04
|
|
|
Job interview coding challenges really run the gamut. I just came to remember another one early in my career as a dev where the guy interviewing was clearly one of the devs himself and not great at handling people. He put me in front of his own work machine, which was set up with an IDE (I don't remember which one tbh, was some time ago) just the way he liked it personally (i.e. not the defaults), with their actual production code open. He told me he'd deliberately inserted some errors in the code and to find them and fix them. Also he hadn't reverted the changes the previous interviewee had made, which he realized and told me to ignore partway through introducing the assignment. I walked out on that one after just staring incredulously at the monitor for a few minutes.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 17:31
|
|
|
Haha I had the same Mac interview experience, but I took the job. On day one I literally couldn’t figure out how to turn on or off my new company Mac (there’s no power button!) I had to convince a QA interviewing team at a previous company that it was not a good idea to greet the applicant then immediately put them completely alone in a meeting room for fifteen minutes with some screenshots to “write a test plan”. I would have walked out after five minutes if someone played that on me.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 17:49
|
|
|
I genuinely cannot understand any company that would make someone write any real code that wasn't pseudocode in any setting other than a take-home test.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 20:13
|
|
|
I once made the decision to use the company-supplied laptop, because my personal one was a slow mess, and solve the interview problem in Python, even though they didn’t have an interpreter installed. I ended up in some website that let me code in the browser. I was half way through the problem when I finally figured out that it pasting in tabs as spaces (or the other way around) and that was what was causing all these baffling errors. Got the job.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 21:49
|
|
|
Our CIO is requesting anyone brought in for an interview fill out some application that lists education and work experience on it, no loving idea why. He got also got mad when someone who had accepted an offer ended up turning it down for another position elsewhere. I think he asked the hiring manager if we had any legal options?? He’s not completely crazy but some of the poo poo he does certainly is.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 22:04
|
|
|
Sounds pretty drat crazy.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2020 23:03
|
|
|
Spring Heeled Jack posted:Our CIO is requesting anyone brought in for an interview fill out some application that lists education and work experience on it, no loving idea why. I think I've stopped listing my education on my resume around 28. Unrelated, let me tell you my tale of woe: I'm really good at WPF. I really like WPF. WPF is a pretty niche skill though and I'm not convinced I have particularly high mobility. The moral of the story is to keep on learning - never stop learning, and hopefully you are learning something for web...
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2020 03:06
|
|
|
Spring Heeled Jack posted:Our CIO is requesting anyone brought in for an interview fill out some application that lists education and work experience on it, no loving idea why. lol I've noped out of online applications that wanted me to basically copy+paste all the job history from my resume into their UI - probably not worth the time given how likely I am to get a reply
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2020 14:17
|
|
|
Canine Blues Arooo posted:I think I've stopped listing my education on my resume around 28. I think it could be worth listing your education if you’ve got like a masters degree or something a little more, but like I’ve just got a bachelors. It’s the bare minimum. And I’m not sure any of the skills I learned in college are something I use on a routine basis that it’s worth wasting the section on my resume. I’ll second your love of WPF though. That’s what made me love working in .NET at my old job. I was good at UI stuff. They were switching their main app to Angular, so your moral still sticks.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2020 15:22
|
|
|
WPF is a mixed bag for me. Granted I don't have much experience with it, but from what I saw the two-way databinding required a lot of boilerplate code, something that I feel defeats the purpose of databinding. Also the default styles don't look great- seemed to be filled with misaligned textbox margins and whatnot. Overall it feels like it lacks polish to me. Part of it was just it leaving a bad first impression- back when WPF first came around it ran like garbage, to the point where I could tell if an app was WPF vs basic WinForms solely by how unresponsive it was.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2020 16:45
|
|
|
Canine Blues Arooo posted:I think I've stopped listing my education on my resume around 28. You can always drop stuff from your resume if it doesn't line up with the job you want to get right now. If you think you'd rather do something less niche, e.g. build some internets with React, do what you can to fill out those skills and drop things that may make employers suspicious (why are you, a Cobol wizard, applying for JavaScript job?). If someone really really wants to split hairs about what you've done professionally and what's a skill from a personal project you can handle that later in the interview process.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2020 00:13
|
|
|
Leave the Bachelor's in your resume as a one liner so that the automated resume processor doesn't drop you sight unseen.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2020 02:13
|
|
|
Volmarias posted:Leave the Bachelor's in your resume as a one liner so that the automated resume processor doesn't drop you sight unseen. I agree, to some people/machines it is make or break that you have it. You spent 4 years on it, put it down as one line at least.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2020 02:53
|
|
|
Oof my team lead just pushed his only PR in months of being on the team and it adds a relative ton of code and introduces a new framework for something that could have done more concisely using things already in heavy use for the team. It’s also a Big Bang ‘make thing go’ ticket that was being worked on outside of our sprint workflow for literal months. I don’t realistically expect something that’s been baking so long will be reworked substantially but my gentlest of feedback is that the team may have difficulty supporting and debugging it. I’ve got about one other functioning engineer in the team who’s able to sort of stay on task and actually help me, otherwise the team is either unfocused and chasing trivialities or unable to get a single (not unreasonably sized) ticket done over multiple sprints. Meanwhile our sprints are snowballing as we double down on uncompleted work without rethinking priority or checking our capacity - we are currently overstuffed with about 3x what math says we can do. I don’t dislike these people but I don’t get it, I’m used to being on a team that at minimum is more bought in about getting something useful out of scrum instead of turning it into a hopeless death march with story points.
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2020 14:51
|
|
|
YanniRotten posted:Oof my team lead just pushed his only PR in months of being on the team and it adds a relative ton of code and introduces a new framework for something that could have done more concisely using things already in heavy use for the team. It’s also a Big Bang ‘make thing go’ ticket that was being worked on outside of our sprint workflow for literal months. I don’t realistically expect something that’s been baking so long will be reworked substantially but my gentlest of feedback is that the team may have difficulty supporting and debugging it. is there no management? that sounds like a huge mess.
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2020 15:19
|
|
|
Inacio posted:is there no management? that sounds like a huge mess. No effective management, I guess is how I’d put it. The direct manager of all engineers on my team has too many direct reports (several teams worth honestly could be 20+ people). This person is here for performance management and 1:1s type stuff but absolutely does not attend our sprint ceremonies. Technically a less overbooked manager is in charge of the actual work we are doing which is kind of a weird split. This person has not really inserted themself at all into the process, they are in attendance at meetings but they sure aren’t steering the boat. I feel like a lot of people are trapped at home and struggling for whatever reason (me too) but for sure middle management seems to have more of an opportunity than ever to just check out.
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2020 19:40
|
|
|
Sounds like management is setting an example and that it's time for some resume-driven development on your part.
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2020 19:44
|
|
|
YanniRotten posted:No effective management, I guess is how I’d put it. The direct manager of all engineers on my team has too many direct reports (several teams worth honestly could be 20+ people). This person is here for performance management and 1:1s type stuff but absolutely does not attend our sprint ceremonies. That sounds like the company I just left and their prod dev team, like eerily similar. Good to know that that kind of mgmt is all over. I def agree that it's probably a good time to focus on yourself and getting some feelers out. If anything, it'll give you some options and less stress on your day to day
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2020 20:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 05:33 |
|
|
Volmarias posted:Leave the Bachelor's in your resume as a one liner so that the automated resume processor doesn't drop you sight unseen. This is especially true if you're in an area with a decent number of government contractors. Contracts often specify minimum credentials for certain positions, most often requiring a BS for a developer role, and sometimes a masters for a management position.
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2020 21:58
|
|
