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Lockback posted:I don't like take home coding tests, I don't like whiteboarding, but I don't always have the best alternatives. For newer engineers, my favorite is "Show me a project you have from school or your own personal project or whatever and let's walk through it", the prep time for most people should be quick and you understand a lot from people on where their skills are. But for more senior people they may not have a project like that they can show. So far that I am not sure what the best route is. I've never interviewed someone, but for jobs I've interviewed for a more experienced engineer positions they just had me describe some projects I've worked on and what challenges came up. I'm sure a good enough bullshitter could get around it, but if the interviewer has experience in the field they should be able to tell if the person knows what they're talking about in most cases.
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Jan 19, 2023 19:12
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dxt posted:I've never interviewed someone, but for jobs I've interviewed for a more experienced engineer positions they just had me describe some projects I've worked on and what challenges came up. I'm sure a good enough bullshitter could get around it, but if the interviewer has experience in the field they should be able to tell if the person knows what they're talking about in most cases. That is basically what we do and I feel like it has somewhat mixed results, enough so that I can understand why people would want to do tests/takehome. Some people are bad at talking at the right level, you sometimes have to really dig to get to "You are describing someone elses work", etc.That said, it's probably the best solution if you can't pull up someone's git and walk through a senior-year website-radio project someone put together.
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Jan 19, 2023 19:18
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In the interviews I've been in and done there are multiple components: one that would include technical questions, another will be soft skills and done by asking about past projects and conflicts, a design problem, and a code type interview. While take homes have equity issues, so do remote interviews for the same reason and along with remote work itself requiring internet access, quiet space, etc as well. In person interviews in another area require a person to be able to leave their home for a couple days (which might require child care or pet care). And that's to say nothing about requiring someone to set aside multiple hours during the business day to interview. Talking about your previous projects can also create equity issues over language barriers that could be reduced by text based interviews. They also can be BSed. There's a reason manager screening still let's through a lot of very underqualified people. Nevermind the gap between being able to talk about things in the abstract and actually being able to use those concepts to write good code. In the end it's a balancing act and you gotta pick the least bad. In my opinion a fairly small take home is less bad than in person coding interviews while still providing an important signal.
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Jan 19, 2023 19:54
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Since I'm typically hiring manufacturing engineers in some form or another, I do the skills-assessment in one of two ways (or sometimes both). Either I do the "tell me about your past work and projects, particularly one where...", or I do a sort-of / kind-of whiteboard project in person. I'm going to quote-paraphrase it below.Sundae's paraphrased in-person example project posted:Okay, so we're going to work through a technical problem at work next. Please understand, I know that you likely don't have the answer for this. I don't expect you to. I'm interested in your thought process here. From there, I just watch and interact, provide information on the scenario, etc. I don't bother with any bullshit like "oh, the operator was wrong" or anything like that because it feels too much like a trap to me. I look mostly for what kinds of questions they ask, how they go through the process and check piece by piece/operation by operation, what functions they call for help, etc etc. Occasionally they land on the right answer, but more often they land somewhere in the vicinity and then don't have the experience or extra system knowledge to dig any deeper. As long as they then refer those details on to someone who's been there longer or who has extra experience to come help them dig, that's still a solid answer to me. What I hate to see is someone who doesn't know how to structure a problem or who can't lay out a process in a way that makes (to them) logical sense. That's my big takeaway from that one, plus if they say anything particularly awful in the post-project discussion. Example of particularly awful, from an interview at J&J: Q: "Can I ask why you didn't talk to the operators during the troubleshooting process?" A: "If they knew anything, they wouldn't be operators."  I honestly have no idea how I'd evaluate coding ability in a fair way, but thankfully I never have to do that.
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Jan 19, 2023 21:02
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Sundae posted:Since I'm typically hiring manufacturing engineers in some form or another, I do the skills-assessment in one of two ways (or sometimes both). Either I do the "tell me about your past work and projects, particularly one where...", or I do a sort-of / kind-of whiteboard project in person. I'm going to quote-paraphrase it below. I do similar but for coding that only gets you so far since most of the time you need to implement too. I do like the "You won't get the answer but let's walk through how you'd get as close as you reasonably can". I generally feel confident about determining "Is this person generally smart" but the "Does this person possess the base skills needed for this role" is a lot harder without making it feel very hoop-jumpy.
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Jan 19, 2023 21:08
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Lockback posted:I do similar but for coding that only gets you so far since most of the time you need to implement too. I do like the "You won't get the answer but let's walk through how you'd get as close as you reasonably can". I generally feel confident about determining "Is this person generally smart" but the "Does this person possess the base skills needed for this role" is a lot harder without making it feel very hoop-jumpy. Yeah, I have absolutely no idea how to do it for coding and am happy I don't have to figure that out.
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Jan 19, 2023 21:13
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I may bag on some of our operators, sure there are lazy ones just like any other class of job. But the absolute worst engineers are the ones that never talk to operators, you dumb mother fuckers they’re the ones actually doing the job.
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Jan 20, 2023 01:54
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Tnuctip posted:I may bag on some of our operators, sure there are lazy ones just like any other class of job. But the absolute worst engineers are the ones that never talk to operators, you dumb mother fuckers they’re the ones actually doing the job. For real. A good operator is worth his weight in gold, and there's something to be said for sheer experience. I've had operators at places I've worked who could tell you something was hosed up with the equipment or process just from hearing a little clicking sound, for example. "That click! That right there! That's new. Stop the machine." The click ended up being a loose track on a rotary turret that hadn't been torqued down correctly. Running a full batch like that probably would've worked it loose and caused $10K+ in damage, plus downtime costs. He didn't know what was wrong, but he knew the machine didn't click and stopped it.
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Jan 20, 2023 04:13
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Sundae posted:Veeva It doesn't sound like my team but is there something I can take an unofficial comment too for you?
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Jan 20, 2023 04:52
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Roundboy posted:It doesn't sound like my team but is there something I can take an unofficial comment too for you? I've made my comment very loudly to the team already.  Veeva has no parent/child relationships, meaning that a complicated change record with lots of moving parts becomes much harder to track, and requires that we create the lineages in the "Comments" field of the initiation or in the execution summary calling out all the linked records. However, because they're not really linked, there's nothing to ensure that gating / order of execution / closure requirements are met on a system level. It falls to the Change QC rep, the QA rep, or the CR owner to make sure that they've hit all the gating in the right order.E: Also, goddamn, how many of us GNEs post here?!?
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Jan 20, 2023 05:16
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The most I’ve seen a candidate crash and burn is when I asked him how he’d go about moving a wheel loader from Wyoming to Ottawa, quickly and cheaply. Dude went on and on about renting a flatbed. No matter how much I prompted him, he never once mentioned customs, or anything related to importation. Despite having ten years of logistics experience on his resume. There was also the guy who blew up at my intern in class because she’d obviously been hired as a diversity hire and he was more deserving of the job but we didn’t interview him. That’s how you get blacklisted from a company who’d never otherwise heard of you.
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Jan 20, 2023 16:00
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FrozenVent posted:There was also the guy who blew up at my intern in class because she’d obviously been hired as a diversity hire and he was more deserving of the job but we didn’t interview him. That’s how you get blacklisted from a company who’d never otherwise heard of you. lmao
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Jan 20, 2023 16:11
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Corp is definitely taking advantage of the recent shift in power and rolling out a new set of Return to Office guidelines. I'm not affected as I'm 100% remote, but they're hellbent on dragging people back into the office no matter what. What I don't get is we have hard, concrete, irrefutable data that people are more productive working at home, but they still insist on dragging people back in. I also find it interesting that it's different for every department. I'm in IT and they aren't asking us to return to the office at all, because we already have trouble hiring and keeping top IT talent and they don't want to lose more people than we already have. The front line workers, customer service, and some various back office teams though where folks maybe have less options right now, they're requiring at least 3 days a week in the office. My wife works at the same place I do, and they've been doing 1 day a week for a while which isn't terrible, but it was a joke. Everyone shows up around 8 and then leaves at lunch time. We live a little farther away so to beat traffic she gets there at 6am and leaves by 1. All this does is waste 4 to 6 hours of her life sitting in traffic every week. I would understand if her job required any sort of collaboration, but she interacts with no one at all. She gets her cases assigned, she does her work, she uploads the results. She can go an entire week without talking to anyone else at work sometimes.
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Jan 20, 2023 17:14
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todays' my scheduled in-office day so I got my tired rear end out of bed at 3:30 in the loving morning so I could be in the office by 5. I live an hour away with no traffic. Get to the office and...oh my god I left my laptop at home. Got back home at 6:30 and just worked from home. So far nobody's noticed, or cared.
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Jan 20, 2023 17:50
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Local university is insisting all staff come to work 3/5 days. Have a few friends there. Admins are dug in and holding fast to antiquity, hiring yes men to replace the higher ups who dipped. I imagine COVID exposed some serious bloat. Boggles the mind to think of all the useful things that could be done with buildings other than office space, but that would require more than marketing. I guess it’s on me for thinking cynicism toward higher ed might scare em up a bit, if the conservatives taking power didn’t make em budge.
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Jan 20, 2023 17:54
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my department was spared by this, but the company used WFH as an excuse to cut down on a lot of office space, then replaced it with a hoteling suite in a singular location in case anyone wanted to come in. Then they mandated people come back in. The hoteling area isn't actually equipped with anything so all you get is a single monitor that IT was able to scrounge up. So now you have engineers working off of a laptop touchpad and laptop keyboard with nothing but a tiny 19" monitor, not being allowed to use their good setups at home. All in the name of collaboration (in a shared environment surrounded by strangers)
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Jan 20, 2023 18:14
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Sundae posted:I've made my comment very loudly to the team already. Understood, and to clarify, Im on the Veeva side . Just not in that particular thing
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Jan 20, 2023 18:14
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Roundboy posted:Understood, and to clarify, Im on the Veeva side Ahh, gotcha! Yeah, this is purely a user-side thing.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:27
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My Wife's company was proposing a 1 day a week RTO. Your team would each have individual assigned days, so if there was an outbreak it wouldn't take out your whole team. You would only see people from other teams.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:29
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I've been permanently remote for what's approaching a half decade, but my wife is being "forced" to go into the office one day a week for her job where was hired on as a remote employee. Except she has refused and told them they can let her go if it's an issue, which apparently they didn't expect. So a month later they reiterated that coming in once a week was an expectation of the job, and she reiterated that she didn't agree to that. She hasn't heard anything since that last meeting, and I suspect she won't until February.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:31
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I know that the US way of writing dates is an annoying thing to deal with. It's true and I get that. However When our India-based guys use lakh and crore formatting in Excel? Now that's a surefire way to break brains. It's like a reality glitch, a digital SCP. If you're not used to seeing that number format, your eyes simply refuse to parse it.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:42
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Tibalt posted:I've been permanently remote for what's approaching a half decade, but my wife is being "forced" to go into the office one day a week for her job where was hired on as a remote employee.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:45
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Sundae, about his best intern ever posted:I wish I could've brought my intern from J&J over too, but my former manager burned him out on the pharma industry and he went to work at a bleach factory in upstate NY as a process engineer when his internship ended. I tried to convince him to apply to a role like 5 yrs ago and he doesn't believe me that there are non-poo poo pharma companies. When I worked at J&J in Pennsylvania, I had a kid from upstate NY come in for an interview. He'd been referred in by one of the career-fair outreach folks who was advertising interns, and they'd met him at a fair in Pittsburgh. He starts out as an average, mild-mannered candidate. He's a college junior at a middling school in upstate New York, he's studying mechanical engineering, and he really doesn't know too much about what he wants to do. He's taken some bio courses and some process engineering courses (that surprised me - most universities don't offer anything like that) and he wanted to try the pharma industry. We had an opening for a process engineer / techops intern, and he wanted to learn more. IMO, that's a pretty danged good reason to do an internship - you learn about the field, we learn about you, and it's a paid position (pretty well-paid in pharma usually too). Win win. With undergrad applicants, you definitely don't have a lot of work experience to ask them about. So, you start out by asking them about academic projects. This is paraphrased because it's been like seven years now, but this is how his project interview question went. Sundae: "So, can you tell me about a time you had challenges with a project, what happened, and how you worked them out? This can be academic, group work, another internship, whatever you have to work with from your experience." Candidate: "My best friend and I started our own skateboard company. We design our own custom decks, get them manufactured in China with kinda-sorta print-on-demand with small, limited runs, and then handle shipping out to our customers in the US." At this point, he pulls out a binder from his backpack and starts showing me pictures of skateboards, pictures of him and his friend standing next to chinese workers on a manufacturing line holding up a board, etc etc. Candidate: "We had a series of customer complaints come back that our prints were peeling off the boards in like six weeks, which is way too soon. Something's wrong with the process for that to happen so quickly." Sundae: "So, what did you do?" Candidate: "We contacted the factory through our product manager over there and arranged for a visit to come see the line and figure out what was wrong. We arranged passports and flights, got a short visa [I think?], and went over to inspect the process and see what happened. It was (whatever he said - something with a bake step for the final coat over the paint job)." At this point, he asks if he can use our whiteboard, and he draws out a rough schematic of the board-making process on the board, with where the problem was. He's basically answered my next question (the problem-solving pharma study) in skateboard form before I've even asked it. Sundae: "So you literally found the problem, went to the source and fixed it?" Candidate: "Well, then we had to figure out what to do about all the defective boards. We couldn't really do a recall or anything because we didn't keep that good of records, but we sent out replacements to everyone who contacted us." Sundae:  We chat a little longer, and then I decide that to be fair, I have to still ask him the pharma problem-solving question. I asked everyone else the question, I shouldn't deviate from that aspect of the script. I explain that I'll be playing the role of his various resources/personnel, explain that he has black spots in the finished product, and then I sketch out the manufacturing process on the whiteboard and hand control to him. The kid proceeds to call in the operators and ask them questions about what they saw, asks who he should talk to so he can see the defect in person, asks what he should see instead of this defect (Is / Is Not). He goes to the beginning of the process and starts dissecting it, kinda like this... Candidate: "Okay, so just raw materials here, unprocessed?" Sundae: "Yep." Candidate: "Can we check them for black specks?" Sundae: "Yep. Operators saw nothing during pre-check, and now that you're looking, it still looks good." Candidate: "What does 'looks good' mean?" (This is a fabulous question.) Sundae: "White powder, matching specification. No black specks." He continues all the way down the process until he finds the first appearance of black specks, then stops and starts digging in on that step. (The source is a mechanical vibrator to keep powder flowing, which is causing metal-on-metal rubbing in a hopper and dropping little black specks of steel into the powder in the press hopper, then compacting them into the tablets.) He's not able to catch that particular aspect, but ID's where in the process it is and then says he'd need help from someone with experience or to see the actual machine to go further from there. About the only thing he didn't do (and may not have realized he could; it's an internship after all) was ask for composition of the black specks (which would've told him elemental breakdown / ID as stainless steel in his version of the question). So basically, insanely advanced for an intern who doesn't even know if he wants to be in the field. He's a legit problem-solving guy, has dealt with third party manufacturers in China on his passion-project side gig, and was both thoughtful and methodical in how he dug into a problem he didn't have the background to solve. I spent the entire second half of the interview trying not to do a happy-dance, basically. Hell yes, we hired him. And then my boss scared him out of the industry entirely by the time his internship was done. 
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Jan 20, 2023 19:13
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Sundae posted:And then my boss scared him out of the industry entirely by the time his internship was done. an unfortunately successful internship then, probably.
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Jan 20, 2023 19:19
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Lockback posted:an unfortunately successful internship then, probably. He even knows ‘fail fast’
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Jan 20, 2023 21:24
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Sundae posted:And then my boss scared him out of the industry entirely by the time his internship was done. Wish someone had done me that favour in semiconductors back in 2000...
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Jan 20, 2023 21:28
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Lockback posted:an unfortunately successful internship then, probably. Yep. He learned what he didn't like and ran for it. Kudos to him. He is currently working in either Rochester or Buffalo NY as a process engineer on a bleach manufacturing line.
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Jan 20, 2023 21:37
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Guy Axlerod posted:My Wife's company was proposing a 1 day a week RTO. Your team would each have individual assigned days, so if there was an outbreak it wouldn't take out your whole team. You would only see people from other teams. Did anybody stop to think that if you're not even in proximity with your team, then even the entire pretense that working in the office is better because of collaboration falls apart? Because that poo poo's hilarious.
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Jan 20, 2023 22:36
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Che Delilas posted:Did anybody stop to think that if you're not even in proximity with your team, then even the entire pretense that working in the office is better because of collaboration falls apart? Because that poo poo's hilarious. They just want worker asses in seats in the building. Whose asses exactly doesn't matter at all.
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Jan 21, 2023 01:57
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It's trying to get a government job but worse as you don't get the government job perks. I knew I hated this. My company somehow lost 10 skids.
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Jan 21, 2023 02:56
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Che Delilas posted:Did anybody stop to think that if you're not even in proximity with your team, then even the entire pretense that working in the office is better because of collaboration falls apart? Because that poo poo's hilarious. My fiancée’s product development team is now in the office Tuesday and Wednesday every week so they can collaborate. Except they also cancelled all of the in person meetings those days because they have to use their conference rooms as office spaces because there’s too many people and no one has assigned desks. It’s loving amazing.
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Jan 21, 2023 03:48
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I go in two days a week but it's variable which ones and most scheduled around going for drinks so it works out quite well. Any way in an excellent parody of "good news everyone!" after a load of spiel about what management expect for next year and blah blah "there's no do nothing option" (except management did nothing for 10 years which is why we're in this mess), the budget guy took over and basically said "it's hosed, it's all hosed and it's actually going to get more hosed. And it looks like it will stay hosed next year as well, so I wouldn't assume that you can even fill spots we have open because people have left". Cool. Cool.
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Jan 21, 2023 13:46
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We've been told 40% time in the office going forward, which is hilarious as I'm literally the only person from my team based in this city. If you expand out there's one other person from my directorate and maybe one more from another directorate that I have any dealings with. Thankfully my boss is content to pay little attention to where I am so I won't be spending an hour a day travelling to sit on Teams calls.
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Jan 21, 2023 14:37
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Yeah, see, this is how it starts. ‘This is not an employee choice’: The CEO of Morgan Stanley gets real and says employees can’t simply choose to work remotely (archive link)
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Jan 21, 2023 15:53
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The choice is to not work for Morgan Stanley.
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Jan 21, 2023 15:59
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I'm surprised to hear so many places mandating returning. At our company we're looking at using some carrots to get a day a week for people who want (like snacks/lunch that day, planning all-hands on those days, etc). So far our C-leader has been insisted for us it remains optional (and myself and others have been re-enforcing that if it changes there will be retention issues where we least want them). Some other teams are pushing harder, but like for 1 day a week or so. I think our London sales guys have to come in regularly now but I don't pretend to understand what motivates what sales people do.
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Jan 21, 2023 16:32
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smackfu posted:The choice is to not work for Morgan Stanley. Yeah, it's this. There's still jobs at most levels where remote work is fine; I guess mostly at companies that don't have massive property holdings.
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Jan 21, 2023 16:39
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My CEO is a germaphobe 
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Jan 21, 2023 16:42
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I understand it’s traumatizing to see a floor of empty desks when you just paid the real estate bill but at some point that’s just mismanagement.
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Jan 21, 2023 16:50
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smackfu posted:I understand it’s traumatizing to see a floor of empty desks when you just paid the real estate bill but at some point that’s just mismanagement.
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Jan 21, 2023 17:03
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