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Wrote them a few pointers, my near decade experience in replying passive aggressive emails paying dividends
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Feb 3, 2022 16:17
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wilderthanmild posted:Spinning up an entire lovely version of reddit or whatever in my spare time? Go gently caress yourself. I submitted it and they ghosted me and I still hold a grudge I wasn't clear whether they were looking for basic proficiency in making a form with some validations and CSS, or some amazing frontend tour-de-force, and since they didn't give me any feedback I'll never know! Sivart13 fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Feb 3, 2022 |
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Feb 3, 2022 16:26
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i showed u my full stack plz respond
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Feb 3, 2022 16:29
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CPColin posted:i showed u my full stack plz respond Sir, that was a picture of your ding dong.
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Feb 3, 2022 17:11
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Hey, my back end was in there too
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Feb 3, 2022 17:19
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Sir, that was a picture of your ding dong. Just emailin' a zipfile containing myWildHog.js and calling it a day.
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Feb 3, 2022 17:19
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I favor giving take-homes, but try to make it as easy as possible: the app is already set up, your primary knowledge to make it go will be, "can I clone a git repo, can I get a PG server on my machine to connect to, can I run a command to start the server?" I have 10 issues in the GH issue tracker from a few bug fixes to a couple of features. I tell candidates to pick up 2-3 and to spend less than 2 hours on it if possible, and by no means spend more than 4. The rest of our cycle is an hour with devs, 30 minutes with product, and usually have an hour scheduled with management, but for the people we've offered, we've been out of that in 30, and we were able to give an offer to one of those in the interview. Hit on 2, got beat on 1, made a bad hire on 1. Probably had... 15 or so go through the take-home? The bad hire had the warning signs in the take-home too, but had a strong ref and was a nice enough person that we're not upset that we tried. Just struggled with the complexity. Our 4 offers probably spent around 3-3.5 hours each in the process with us, though I think we went over with Pollyana (drat you goog) just because we enjoyed talking with them so much.
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Feb 3, 2022 19:49
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Honest Thief posted:Oldie Programming: my near decade experience in replying passive aggressive emails paying dividends New thread title please
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Feb 3, 2022 20:37
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kayakyakr posted:I favor giving take-homes, but try to make it as easy as possible (other than the time it takes to review the submissions (which they can arbitrarily skip if they're assholes))
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Feb 3, 2022 21:16
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Sivart13 posted:I find take-homes are wack because they allow the firm to take up a lot of peoples' time without making a suitable investment on their side Yeah, strongly agree with this. 2-4 hours sounds too long to me. I know the idea is that it's instead of 2-4 hours of live interviewing, but the live interview is costing the company in engineer hours so I think they'll be less willing to waste time. And saying "2-4 hours" means to me that candidates who sink 4 hours in are going to look better, so if I'm not planning to spend more than 2 hours I shouldn't even bother.
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Feb 3, 2022 23:31
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I personally would prefer a take-home (reasonable amount of time) if then the interview is talking about it. What did you do, why did you choose X over Y, how can it be improved, etc. Going to whiteboard coding test(s) where in 30 minutes I have to come up with the most optimized solution to a problem ... I'm too old for that poo poo.
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Feb 4, 2022 00:00
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Mniot posted:And saying "2-4 hours" means to me that candidates who sink 4 hours in are going to look better, so if I'm not planning to spend more than 2 hours I shouldn't even bother. I think these take homes often start off well intentioned, but people move around and leave and you end up with stooges who use the submission as the way to assess candidate quality, which favors those candidates who dump far more time into the submission than is suggested. I’ve definitely seen submissions that look like 15 hours were spent on them be rewarded and weighed favorably enough to extend an offer despite my voicing concern that it appeared that the candidate didn’t follow our time limit. I think I was warmer on the idea of take homes early on but have seen their failure from both sides of the table. There are more bad take home assignments than good from companies and if you get one that isn’t well constructed and seems to incentivize you wasting your time, that should be a strong signal to reject them biceps crimes fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Feb 4, 2022 |
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Feb 4, 2022 00:02
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yeah. you can jump up and down about "only work for N hours," but if I a) want the job and b) don't have something I'm confident will get me an interview after N hours, I'm just gonna pour more time into it until i am confident that i'll be getting that phone call. because there is nothing you can do to stop me (short of not doing takehomes like this), this interview process selects for people willing to put in unpaid time for the job takehomes that are "go do this 45min test on hackerrank" or whatever are fine, but "please implement a thing, and you can do a good job if you want *wink wink*" is some time-stealing BS. fly me to your office and put your skin in the game, otherwise please feel free to peruse my github and employment history for proof that i can close bugs/build features/whatever
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Feb 4, 2022 00:21
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Achmed Jones posted:yeah. you can jump up and down about "only work for N hours," but if I a) want the job and b) don't have something I'm confident will get me an interview after N hours, I'm just gonna pour more time into it until i am confident that i'll be getting that phone call. because there is nothing you can do to stop me (short of not doing takehomes like this), this interview process selects for people willing to put in unpaid time for the job And that's the point. How aren't they enforcing this timeframe? You don't even have to build it yourself. Used Codility or something. This isn't hard, but a lot of companies still don't get it.
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Feb 4, 2022 00:35
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If you really wanted to find a way to make take-homes worse, imposing a hard deadline would be a pretty effective way to do it.
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Feb 4, 2022 05:17
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I had a take home where I emailed the organizers when I was ready, they sent me the problem, then I had to send it back to them within three hours. It was incredibly easy though: make some CRUD endpoints for an in-memory repo. Out of the three hours allotted it took me less than one.
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Feb 4, 2022 05:32
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Maybe this is just because I'm in the NLP/ML world, but the take homes I've encountered are fairly common and mostly sensible. I help with our company's hiring and our process goes: internal recruiter screens resumes and talks to the candidate to make sure they're not dropping slurs, two people do a phone screen with them, candidate gets the simple take home to do over the course of a few days of their choosing, and lastly after review we do an "in person" of a couple of hours with three or four people where we dive into the take home.
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Feb 4, 2022 06:12
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I had a director ask me to make a simpler take-home so he could push through his buddy for a senior position. After I reluctantly did it, the director went and took out additional ~70% of the assignment so that the guy could finally pass it (he flunked 2 take-homes we already gave him, lol). This cowboy is now my "peer". I know it's high time to switch jobs, trust me.
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Feb 4, 2022 13:48
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gbut posted:I had a director ask me to make a simpler take-home so he could push through his buddy for a senior position. I mean. Why not just skip the process if you're going to skip the process?
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Feb 4, 2022 14:08
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Because we're a ~10K people company and there are "rules".
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Feb 4, 2022 14:21
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I'm thinking about moving into contracting and can't decide if it's a good idea or not. Would appreciate some advice. I'm in the UK. My CV in a nutshell is: - Computing and IT BSc Hons (1st class) from the OU - 10 years in QA, split between automated and manual testing, for wireless comms companies e.g. Nokia, Motorola, Vodafone - About 5 years full stack .NET building bespoke web applications - MVC, Entity Framework, SQL Server, JQuery, WebAPI, little bit of Azure exposure, oh and some Winforms (yuck) - Currently (~3 years) at a scientific facility doing Java, full stack again, the client is a desktop app using Eclipse RCP, the server side uses OSGI and Spring XML for configuration (but not other Spring stuff), client <> server comms uses RMI. I'm sick of where I am, progression is stagnant and I really want to move into contracting for the money and for the variety and to be less shackled to corporate nonsense. And ideally I'd like to work remotely as the pandemic has showed me that I'm a lot more effective when I have a bit of peace and quiet. The main problem I have is that my notice period here is 3 months so I can't line up a contract before I give notice. I have a few months expenses in the bank but the anxiety that I might leave and then not be able to find work is paralysing me. I'm open to doing either .NET or Java but I'm worried that I won't be able to get Java contracts because I'm seeing Hibernate and Spring Boot a lot and haven't used either. I can do a course but there would still be nothing on my CV. And on the .NET side I'm worried that being 3 years since I've used it will cause me issues. Also seeing Azure a lot on job listings, which I haven't used very much. On both sides I'm also seeing AWS mentioned a lot which again, I've only used a little bit, and also everyone seems to be mentioning microservices. I understand the concept but haven't worked anywhere using that kind of architecture. I've also done a React course on Udemy and I really like it but I'm assuming there's pretty much zero chance at a pure React contract since I don't have anything on my CV. I know the market's really good at the moment, and job listings always have a laundry list of stuff that they want that aren't necessarily hard requirements, but I don't think I've ever quit anywhere without having something else lined up before and it's making me really nervous. I guess I might have similar issues even with permanent roles and such a long notice period, but it seems more likely I'll find somewhere that will be willing to wait. And I really want to leave where I am so I guess I have to give my notice at some point. I was going to give my notice this morning but I've basically bottled if, and I'm off this afternoon. I keep looking at job listings to try and reassure myself there is plenty of work, which there is, but then the imposter syndrome kicks in and I just feel like I could never land any of it. I guess basically I'm looking for views on whether or not I'll have trouble finding contract work with that experience, if anyone has any thoughts. e: I should probably that I'm not scared of learning new stuff in the slightest. I'm good at doing that rapidly. I'm just worried about getting the jobs in the first place. chippy fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Feb 4, 2022 |
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Feb 4, 2022 15:38
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You're employable with just several years of Java experience alone. If you're concerned about Spring Boot/Hibernate then spin up a simple app while you're loving around in the 3 months after you've given notice. It's not very difficult to learn, especially if you already have experience with Spring.
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Feb 4, 2022 15:43
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Ensign Expendable posted:I had a take home where I emailed the organizers when I was ready, they sent me the problem, then I had to send it back to them within three hours. It was incredibly easy though: make some CRUD endpoints for an in-memory repo. Out of the three hours allotted it took me less than one. This doesn't sound bad if the interviewer can say "tell us what day and time works best for us to hit send" so you can plan ahead. Still, I feel like midpoint between "rudimentary and easy", "can't be done in a reasonable timeframe" and "relies on isoteric knowledge vs development skill" is probably an impossible needle to thread.
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Feb 4, 2022 15:52
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Mniot posted:Yeah, strongly agree with this. I've noticed that JR engineers will spend closer to 3-4 hours on the take home because they're trying to prove they know something about programming. These are the best to ask about why they approached the take-home a certain way. "Fake" Sr's will spend an hour or two slamming a couple of tasks out in a way that makes it obvious that a) they don't know what they're doing, or b) they do know what they're doing but they've never done it on a team. Usually involves poorly thought out code, or a commit history that looks like, "do code" "fix my issue" "wasssupp" "I'm too clever". Actual Sr's will spend an hour, fix the simple things with an atomic git history and email me back saying, "hey, I did a few tasks, how does it look?". Achmed Jones posted:yeah. you can jump up and down about "only work for N hours," but if I a) want the job and b) don't have something I'm confident will get me an interview after N hours, I'm just gonna pour more time into it until i am confident that i'll be getting that phone call. because there is nothing you can do to stop me (short of not doing takehomes like this), this interview process selects for people willing to put in unpaid time for the job We really haven't found that candidates that sink more time into it look better. I can see how this would be true in theory, but it really doesn't match up with our experience. Things like, "add a loading indicator while the update is being saved" are hard to spend a bunch of time on, and if someone submits a 3rd PR and doesn't email me saying, "hey, I'm done", I'll usually reach back out to them to stop them. I also mention that if they have something they'd like us to look at in lieu of a take-home, that is fine. I'll usually take a look at what is linked, and make sure it gives them the best chance of being considered (eg: the code looks great, but is it documented or at least self-documenting, how messy is the commit history, does it do anything beyond being a skeleton app) before putting it to the team. Sivart13 posted:This sounds better than the open ended "do what you want!" take-home I experienced, but in general I find take-homes are wack because they allow the firm to take up a lot of peoples' time without making a suitable investment on their side 1 - this process is designed for a small team. saving man hours is a feature. I'm not talking about google here. 2 - Since we have most of the team review the PR's submitted and give their thoughts, it probably adds up to about as much team time as having 2 additional code interviews with the benefit of us not having to have 2 more developers that are able to give decent technical interviews. --------------------- Really, this all boils down to 2 types of dev interviewee: I would prefer a free time exercise and trust that the employer is not going to waste my time with it. A lot of the others of you prefer the leetcode style that you study for. Neither is wrong, but it does cause a bit of self-selection for companies.
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Feb 4, 2022 17:18
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I've got an informal interview with another company because a person I used to work with just joined high up in the management side and she apparently said I am hot poo poo. Would be fun to work with her again, but they're doing Microsoft stuff so I kind of doubt it's going to go very far. Having an offer would be nice if I was going to push for that raise though.
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Feb 4, 2022 18:53
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thotsky posted:Would be fun to work with her again, but they're doing Microsoft stuff so I kind of doubt it's going to go very far. Why do you think it's not going far? Is it a personal preference or do you think they won't hire outside their stack? Generally if you're a programming oldie you should have enough general programming knowledge to be reasonably production in any stack and stuff in the Microsoft ecosystem is no exception.
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Feb 4, 2022 19:28
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eh, there's a huge difference between algo lottery interviews that are study fests and whiteboarding/discussion/system design that you _can_ study for but is general competency. like sure, somebody can study to learn what a priority queue or depth first search is, but tbh if you have to study for that something's wrong. it's like an electrician having to study when to use a gfci outlet. it's study-able, sure, but it's also something that you should know
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Feb 4, 2022 19:49
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wilderthanmild posted:Why do you think it's not going far? Is it a personal preference or do you think they won't hire outside their stack? Generally if you're a programming oldie you should have enough general programming knowledge to be reasonably production in any stack and stuff in the Microsoft ecosystem is no exception. I am sure I could learn to work with their stack no problem, but it's a consultancy thing so I would expect them to want people they can easily sell. I am making really good money already, so it's not like it would be a cheap hire. I would expect them to want a no brainer at that level. We will see.
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Feb 4, 2022 20:27
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Achmed Jones posted:eh, there's a huge difference between algo lottery interviews that are study fests and whiteboarding/discussion/system design that you _can_ study for but is general competency. like sure, somebody can study to learn what a priority queue or depth first search is, but tbh if you have to study for that something's wrong. it's like an electrician having to study when to use a gfci outlet. it's study-able, sure, but it's also something that you should know Yeah, but isn't the issue the fact that interviews typically ask you the finer details of, and often to implement from scratch, things like DFS? To continue your analogy, I'll bet 99%+ of electricians couldn't explain *how* a GFCI actually works, or they'd give a handwavy answer about current in=current out. They wouldn't be expected in an interview to prove how Maxwell's equations define how current induces voltage in toroidal coils. Knowing when to use a pre-existing library written by experts (or GFCI circuitry built by electrical engineers) isn't what most of these coding interviews are actually testing for.
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Feb 4, 2022 21:46
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DFS in this analogy is more like knowing how to do a 2 switch light circuit, not internals of gfci. Internals of gfci would be "explain and prove paxos".
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Feb 4, 2022 21:56
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chippy posted:I'm thinking about moving into contracting and can't decide if it's a good idea or not. Would appreciate some advice.
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Feb 4, 2022 23:54
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Naar posted:I'm a contractor in the UK. In my experience, the market is pretty good right now for finding work. I think you will need to bite the bullet and give notice without having something in hand, but I'd say it's fairly likely that you'd be able to find a role. To be honest, a lot of contractors I've worked with haven't been genius 10x ninjas. The key skills are good at convincing clients you will be able to help and getting productive fast (like within a few days, ideally). Send me a PM if you want more specific advice about anything! Thank you, I appreciate that. I may well shoot you a couple of questions over the next day or two.
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Feb 5, 2022 00:43
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I had a funny experience today. A company I had done some consulting for something like 8 years ago reached out to me to see if I had any interest in working for them. Since I knew a few folks still there and I'm still interested-ish in what they are building I said sure let's have an informal talk. No skin off my back, no expectations, plus I'm curious to hear what they're up to. Naturally at the end I talk to the HR director to see if there's interest and a path forward, and the inevitable comp expectation comes up. I'm (mostly) happily employed at a public tech co and know I'm in a strong position, so I tell them to even consider jumping I'd need TC in the 300s, which wouldn't even be a raise. The smile on her face disappeared sooooooo fast. "There's no way". Companies out here really trying to poach senior+ engineers from name brand companies offering comp levels from 5-10 years ago.  Maybe they're just genuinely not aware of how much the market has moved. And I sympathize a bit with how hard it is to compete without RSU packages, but sheesh. If you can't offer the scrilla come up with something else, like extra generous vacation or reduced hours or something. I might even be interested in that sort of thing. Guinness fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Feb 5, 2022 |
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Feb 5, 2022 02:58
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Guinness posted:I had a funny experience today. A company I had done some consulting for something like 8 years ago reached out to me to see if I had any interest in working for them. Since I knew a few folks still there and I'm still interested-ish in what they are building I said sure let's have an informal talk. No skin off my back, no expectations, plus I'm curious to hear what they're up to. When I was interviewing a couple months ago, a AAA games company was talking constantly about how much they crunch and how they printed a few billion for their employers whenever they launched a new version. Then offered me less than 50% of my then current comp. Lol. Just... Lol
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Feb 5, 2022 03:18
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Yeah I turned my back on games after grad school when I got an offer from a small studio that I had previously done some intern work for. Compared to my other offers it was 30% less base pay, employment on a project basis, lots of crunch, and no benefits. I noped out and have never once regretted it.
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Feb 5, 2022 03:43
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There's a Finnish consultancy firm opening up shop here and depending on pay I'm considering joining. Their operation here is really young, they even use a cowork space here instead of having an office. What I'm debating though is currently I've been working on product companies for the bigger half of the past decade, going back to consultancy feels like a stepback. Glassdoor reviews seem alright, but those seem to have become less useful as of late.
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Feb 8, 2022 10:52
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My annual review came rolling in and was much better than I expected yet also seems to just be putting me where I should have been years ago. I got promoted to the next grade and I suppose I'm beyond the basic senior title by most metrics. My base went from $132 to $159 and my total went from something like $180 to $236. I should be happy. However, last I checked with a colleague a few years ago who went to Apple, he had $179 base then so it's still kind of crap. It does make me feel better about this strange pivot in my career into Linux Kerneland and I don't feel as bad falling into that role as I wasn't really in the web/distributed stuff in the first place and I didn't have any other specialization. A few Microsoft and Amazon applications from a while ago roborejected this week for some reason. I don't really understand the significance of this week. I don't think I applied to them around the same time. Somebody at Amazon in AWS was trying to get me again and I turned them away. I think AWS just doesn't want to hire me and can't just say that. They'll have me go through everything, tell me I answered all the questions, and then just reject me anyways. Some recruiter from Meta then tried to get a hold of me and I flat out told them I can't be bothered to practice enough to do two leetcode mediums in under 40 minutes over and over again. They're claiming they're in a different organization that doesn't do that. I don't know how much to trust them.
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Feb 10, 2022 07:44
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I don't know how much to trust them. Don't trust recruiters. Their incentives are not yours. Work with them and use them for your own gain, but don't trust 'em.
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Feb 10, 2022 08:07
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I would just simply be happy with $236k TC. Congrats, you make about double what I do. (And I’m not too unhappy with my compensation!)
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Feb 10, 2022 16:02
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fourwood posted:I would just simply be happy with $236k TC. Congrats, you make about double what I do. (And I’m not too unhappy with my compensation!) If you're also beyond the basic senior title then you're way underpaid and Rocko is somewhat underpaid. I'd expect at least $300k past senior. I wouldn't expect a recruiter to straight up lie about the interview process. They have an incentive for you to pass the interview.
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Feb 10, 2022 20:02
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