There is no standard whatsoever for the adjective "Senior" when applied to engineers:
Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times."
Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others."
And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engineering."
The latter definition is the most interesting to me, it describes what "Staff" and "Principal" engineers do in most orgs. But if I had to pick a line to draw, I'd say that while a Staff or Principal spends most or all of their time working on projects that involve the human/organization issues around the engineering, a senior engineer is one who does this at least part of the time.
There are other, perfectly valid perspectives on what makes an engineer "senior," but what I like about this one that's relevant to TFA is that this kind of "seniority" is hard to fake.
On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive.
As someone who has hired a new grad into a “Senior Engineer” role, it meant the title of the salary band that met the candidate’s salary requirements to make our offer competitive with the other offers he received.
We wanted to hire a junior role since our team was already relatively senior. But the company’s salary bands were not at all competitive for entry-level developers. So we classed the new hire as senior to make it work.
Some companies’ policies are stupid and inflexible and engineers would rather just work around the problem than having to fight against HR.
Sometimes it means “someone who can bill $300 an hour” with no relation to actual ability. I was a “senior” three years out of college and I had no clue what in the world I was doing.
Come to think of it after 20 years I kinda still feel that way.
In the context of 'IT Consulting Companies,' which the blog post is about, it means that clients are paying a higher billable rate than for more 'junior' staff.
When I read "senior" I often interpret it as "has a lot of experience" which has nothing to do with skill. Speaking for myself who has a shit ton of experience in a lot of tools, techniques, languages and so on but is SHIT in most of them. I'd be hired before a lot of better candidates based on my years of experience in the area but not because of my skill in the area.
Looking at many job posts senior means capable of using React and capable of talking about, but not necessarily using, TypeScript. When senior sounds like faster junior I really have trouble finding what actually differentiates a senior from a junior at these organizations.
id agree with these points, but argue its an everything kind of package that comes within the first year of someone hiring on.
whenever I help hire a senior-level engine mechanic or technician for a shop, I need to know they can do the work without a lot of supervision. I also need to know theyll resolve the issues on the shop floor and be able to communicate those issues to a customer as well as a greenhorn tech straight out of a brake shop without chewing them up if its their fault. They need to have the ability to delegate things, get along with people and get the job done.
most of all, i dont need the team to see "a new senior mechanic just got hired." I need the team to see a new mechanic and form a consensus that she is senior based on their walk, not my talk. in that first year ill spend more time in the break room sucking down folgers and listening, or just walking the floor stocking ear plugs and soap dispensers and waiting to see what they do.
We try to map some of these titles across different companies with Levels.fyi
We also normalized some of the scope and responsibility definitions for software engineering levels based on what we've seen through company leveling rubrics that we collect: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
> While I certainly don't approve of these practices, I'm also not saying that these companies are only evil. I view that they serve a very strong need in some corners of the system, like a coding bootcamp for the less fortunate.
Absolutely not. I was in college for CS/CE, dropped out during an economic crisis, joined the military, and had to work my way through technician, network engineer, systems engineer, DevOps, SRE, and finally I am a very senior SWE. That was over a decade long journey and has made quite an impact on how I've lived my life.
I didn't lie to get jobs or interviews, I didn't embellish. Instead I had to research what was being done with my resume, I had to work with third-party recruiters, I had to write letters to hiring managers to get interviews. The people that are the subject of this article had the privilege to go to and finish college, that is your free pass. You don't get to cheat the job market just because you think you deserve it.
If you can't tell, I'm incredibly frustrated reading this post.
Edit: I do feel for people who have a lack of opportunity. I was there, I lived it, I felt it. That said, it's certainly not the only emotion I connect with when reading this story.
First, I hear ya. But I don't feel he's described his colleagues well enough for me to have your convictions. I can tell that even in reading it, I'm dropping into the roles the sorta people I grew up with. And that gives me my own sense of the slippery slope.
For some people there's no path. Military service (USA or Euro or whatever) is a great catch-all that many people use to braid their own bootstraps, and I'm happy you had it, but many people don't have that luxury. I'm not saying it wasn't brutal work and commitment, but access to the ability to DO hard work (with rewards instead of extraction) is often luxury.
Some people need to hustle more, and that usually means being scrappy. I feel for your perspective because I've been on your side, criticizing the tactics of extended family from other cultures. It didn't go well, and I've since learned that what some families need to do to survive and succeed looks very different from what I might assume is right. I don't like it; I don't do it; I don't want it to be that way; but I can't dismiss it.
I've been involved in hiring decisions on teams I've been part of for a long time now. Blatant plagiarism, obvious embellishments and more subtle BS is literally part of the game unfortunately. This is particularly prevalent when dealing with (almost) any consultancy, large and small.
I will not specifically call out names, but the some of the largest and most well known consultancies do this as a matter of practice after they overbook themselves for projects for which they do not have staff on the bench to fill.
It's sad, but honestly the prevalence of these practices (and perhaps growth of them?) only makes the genuine among us more valuable. Those who actually posses technical talent and experience will be needed more and more by companies who get burned by the frauds. Onward and upward I guess.
When I was interviewing developers from a very large offshoring firm, they covertly had an account manager listening in to take down the questions for future candidates. Each interview, I'd ask a slightly different variation and it became obvious what was going on when a candidate gave a textbook answer to the question I'd asked the previous candidate, including references to tables I hadn't mentioned and that had no purpose in the problem I presented them.
Also had an incident where I interviewed one person but am pretty sure someone different showed up and was completely clueless about the most basic tasks. Within a week I think they figured out that I was onto them and made some excuse to quit about taking a contract closer to home.
Honestly, at this point many American companies have an office of their own offshore, and it's generally considered more prestigious and better condensated to work for those companies directly, so I assume there's close to zero talent left in the large outsourcers.
Large outsourcing companies are not really hired for talent (at least not from what I saw in the investment banking world).
They're hired as scapegoats, and attached to an already failed project. Then they're publically blamed for the failure, while the actual guy responsible gets away with murder (and maybe even hops into a new internal role with better pay).
If I was to rename the consulting/outsourcing industry, I would probably call it the "professional scapegoat" industry.
Indian offshoring companies like Wipro, TCS, etc pay $500 per month for fresh graduates from the engineering colleges, where lecturers are incompetent. In a team of 10, only two are capable, all others are for billable hours for these companies. Some of these newbies can learn and improve skills and jump to other companies in a couple of years.
In the end, what matters is the cheapest labor, and billable hours. Account managers are judged on how much profit they bring.
I presume something must have caused you to start giving slightly different questions, right? You did so because you wanted to see if they were collaborating in this fashion.
What was that "something," if you don't mind me asking?
The apartment mentioned in the article stirred up some memories.
Back in the early 90's, I worked for a company that had a long term contract for software development and support in another city. The team that worked on that project would rotate up and stay in an apartment that the company maintained there. While I never worked on the project and never saw the apartment, I heard many tales about it, which indicated that it was terrible. Too small, non-functioning amenities, just an utter dive. The team that worked there would just grouse about it to other devs, but never said anything to management, because they assumed they were just being cheap.
Well, someone finally mentioned it (probably during an exit interview) and management was shocked. They had been paying top dollar for what they thought was a luxury apartment, and instead were getting ripped off. I think they wound up getting a different, better apartment for the devs.
This is another reason that, while I understand people’s complaints, I still believe CS interviews should include algorithmic and whiteboard tests. I know they may seem “outdated” or “irrelevant” to some, and yes, it is very unlikely that you will need to implement Dijkstra’s algorithm by hand without any reference, but it is more that it shows a general competence in computing which will transfer to other, more relevant areas. Also, another key insight to whiteboarding is whether you can recognize the fundamental nature of the problem as an instance of another problem, which is essential to CS since the entire field is about solving problems efficiently.
Funnily enough in my career, whenever I took a job after an algorithm and whiteboard test, I would find myself doing the most basic CRUD applications whereas when I interviewed in a more humane way, by talking and exploring the knowledge set I bring to the table, I ended up working with cool algorithms in some highly technical areas.
>since the entire field is about solving problems efficiently.
The entire theoretical CS field yes. In the practical field of CS engineering, this is only a subset of the useful competences and a small one at that. Communication, working as part of team, reliability, ability to look up and learn things you don't currently know, caring about the state of the code you write, mentoring others, being able/willing to push for things you believe can be done better (not just in terms of algorithm, but processes affecting the entire business) etc. are all as important.
I would much rather hire someone that sucks in algos/data structure, but is fairly good on all those other points than the opposite.
So yes, whiteboarding can be useful to assess how a candidate is doing on one of the specific skills that are useful for a CS engineer, but if 50% to 90% of your hiring decision is based on that, just like it is in FANGs today, you have an inadequate hiring process IMHO.
For the average SDE job. If your job is to implement and optimize a compiler, then sure it's extremely important.
I'm a firm believer that you should include them, if they are part of the job. If not, especially if they're completely unrelated, then they're just a reason somebody is going to have a harder time passing your interview. If you want that, that's your prerogative, but generally IMHO you should focus on finding owners, people who are going to give it their best to provide quality and love their code/contribution. Whether they know how to rock from day one, or they're going to learn it on the job.
It's not an easy thing to look for, I know, but it's what we should be striving towards IMHO and what I'm focusing on. So far it has had great results, with a few misses, but a better success rate than just handing out technical stuff.
If I hire you, I'm going to be a lot more interested if you know how to get a backtrace for every thread in a process than if you can whiteboard Dijkstra's algorithm. I'm going to be a lot more interested if you know anything the issues with denormals and use of -ffast-math than any of your familiarity with sorting algorithms (which will no doubt exceed mine). I'm going to be a lot more interested in whether you understand how to iterate over a utf8 string than your understanding of how to construct an AST and use it.
I worked in a (good) CS department for 4.5 years. They did not teach programming skills to anyone. Most (not all, but most) of the jobs you might be hired to do require far more from the programming skills area than the "computer science" area. People coming out of that program (even at the PhD level) often didn't not even understand how to use a debugger!
It really depends on what kind of developer you're looking for. In the web applications I've worked on, knowledge of application architecture and experience with linux trumps anything I learned in a college course.
Based on my experience, theory problems on white boards is about as useful as dropping a CUPs automation problem on unsuspecting interviewees.
Build me a CUPs driver that drops pdf into in folder in 15 minutes or less. Without documentation.
Bonus points if you can ask if you can skip that bullshit and install and configure an existing a package.
Note: I'm a senior developer with at least a decade of experience. I don't just slap two libraries together. If you want to have fun, dig into how macOS sandboxes CUPs. My bash scripts were not happy.
Agree on what you said. Whiteboard tests on textbook algorithms is a really efficient *and* lazy way of objectively testing a candidate's abilities. The nature of the questions will prevent the interviewer from mistakenly getting impressed by hyperbole.
That said, I do understand why people complain about algorithm questions -- it's undeniably a good filter if you have a large pool of candidates (and a reasonable predictor of ability), but it's mostly irrelevant to most software jobs today since you can usually import textbook algorithms as OSS modules.
The "correct" but harder way to interview is to tailor the interview questions to your actual requirements. This is much more involved and it requires the interviewers to divert attention from whatever they're working on just to set the problems. Setting a problem that's at the right difficulty level and evaluates the right set of skills precisely tailored to the team's needs is hard. (I don't think most typical software engineers have the chops to do this, even experienced senior ones.)
So it's kinda understandable that everyone just randomly picks something from leetcode and use that instead. It's probably not so much a failure of the software industry on the recruiting side, but more of a symptom of how we have failed to come up with skills, tricks, standards and practices that everyone actually agrees on. (eg. it's mostly fruitless to determine whether a candidate is hire-worthy with a question like "would you use Javascript to implement a backend system?") At least the algorithm questions are objectively agreed to be true (even if possibly irrelevant) by everyone and is actually part of most CS cirricula...
Knowing Dijkstra's algorithm off the top of your hand doesn't show a general competence in computing. It shows that you've memorised Dijkstra's algorithm and can get through leetcode "problems". Does the person you're hiring need this knowledge to do their daily job? If not, then you shouldn't be wasting your time questioning them about it.
I remember when I was in high school, I had some friends who studied karate, and they were like, "I finally made it to black belt." Meaning, they were a master now. They were 16 years old, and had maybe 3 years experience. In Taiwan, in the 1890s... uh, they would not be regarded as black belt.
Even then it was clear that there was a lot of "belt inflation" happening. The karate schools like the children to feel like they are making progress, so every 6 months the children got a new belt, until finally they were black belts.
It seems like the same thing has been happening with engineering titles.
Fwiw, black belt was basically when you actually started learning. Everything up until then was really just gaining what you needed in order to actually start learning. IIRC the “black” represented the dirt (effort) accumulated over time.
Especially in times when managers want to retain their best, they often can’t get HR to budge on salaries. So they promote them to get them into a competitive salary range.
Author here. I wrote this post after my comment on the post you're mentioning was rather well received. People asked me to write about that experience in more detail, so I did and shared it here. It's a related story, not an identical one.
I know a few people who have gone this route and now have very successful careers. Getting a job as a new grad is hard as it is, and if you are on a visa you barely have a month or two before you must obtain sponsorship or pack up and leave the country. "Consultancies" like this one give you a buffer, beef up your resume with fake experience and give you interview training, with the end goal of getting you a permanent tech job and getting a cut of your salary for the first N months.
Honestly, I don't even fault them for it. The author seemed a bit naive about the situation he was getting into, and he left, which is fair. Ultimately this whole thing is just a symptom of a broken immigration and hiring system. If an embellished resume can fool an entire big tech interview panel and the candidate actually does good work for them moving forward, who should take the blame for it?
While I'm not at all surprised that foreign students could easily get sucked into this kind of scheme what really surprises me is that an American CS grad would not have much better options, especially with all the hype about "lack of workers".
One real moral of this story may be that the immigration system is so broken, and it has cascading consequences. Why not let people on student visas stay longer while job-searching?
As a fresh graduate I can really relate with this article. The number of recruiters that reached out to me since I started applying two months ago is insane, some of them just want a Microsoft Word version of my resume, some straight up asked me to add fake projects and internships on my resume.
That's without bringing the number of recruiters that wants you to pay them a weekly fee and "guarantee" you a job in X number of weeks.
I'll end with one funny recruiter that reached out two weeks ago from a similar recruiting firm. I made it clear from the beginning that I will NEVER lie on my resume neither allow them to edit my resume. He offers me this job that he found for me. I started asking about the compensation and he says 18$/hour, I laughed and said that this rate won't work for me especially in the Bay Area. He said he'll circle back with his manager and try to get me 65K/year like I asked which I believe is fair for someone fresh off school like me, I am not chasing after a FAANG salary especially being a recent grad. Anyways long story short, he calls me back and offers me $20/hour without any benefits this time. I just humbly declined and politely asked him to not reach me again.
The market seems to be hot for Senior developers, which leaves recent grads struggling to find jobs especially in a remote setting. I'm grateful that I am like OP where I can fall back on my parents and keep looking for a job neither do I need sponsorship.
This whole tale could have been me in Europe, 17 years ago.
I was desperately looking for a job, and these consulting firms are a dime a dozen. So there I went, fresh off uni, interview with a medium sized consulting firm from Mexico.
First day, one of the managers bragged about putting half dozen engineers in a motel, at walking distance from the customer offices, three per room, only things they did were work, eat and sleep, for six straight months.
Knowing no better and in dire need of money, I took the job.
Six months in, and after several weeks working 60 hours, I quit the day after I had a heat stroke because they moved us in a new office space with no windows or A/C.
I learnt afterwards that they were charging the customer 4x the rate they were paying me. Of course, they had "sold" me as a "senior developer".
Looks like H-1B abusers have touched a new nadir of chicanery and skullduggery. They prey on people who are not able to get interviews or jobs on their own, but have compelling reasons, such as crushing debt incurred to study in the U.S., to even consider debasing themselves in this way. There have been a couple of enforcement actions by the DoJ in Jersey and a few other places, but they have barely touched the tip of the iceberg.
Once a company sponsors an employee for a Green Card application, it has every incentive in the world to exploit and mistreat the employee. And many companies routinely act on the incentives.
It's unfortunate that a lot of the mass focus is on illegal immigrants, who have less of a legal standing and moral case than those who have followed the laws of their host country to the letter, but still find themselves treated like dirt. This is one of the unfortunate byproducts of electoral politics and representative democracy: sometimes, there are groups that are unlikely to matter electorally given their numbers, and their concerns are always given short shrift no matter how legitimate.
Of course, the H-1B system itself has done enormous damage to the industry by enabling companies such as IBM to mass fire entire cohorts of older people. As usual, efforts at reform have been fitful, uneven, and have been subject to the vagaries of the political winds.
Side note: there are (legitimate) training services that teach coding and interviewimg skills that have a setup where they try to get you a job (without fudging your CV). If you don't get a job you pay very little, but if you get a (good) job you pay similar to 10% or your salary for a few years. A pretty smart and entrepreneurial arrangement in my opinion.
(Unfortunate I don't remember the name or further details, I had read this in the newspaper in Mumbai perhaps 4 years ago.)
The place I used to work at hired fresh grads into senior positions exclusively to make the job more attractive. Sr. Engineering (position) had a much wider salary band, so it was apparently easier to hire fresh grads with a Masters degree into those positions, on the lower end of the band, and keep them there for 2-3 years before actually handing out any raises.
We also had very cheap company housing, and a lot of other perks.
And I suppose this is the opposite of Apple's strategy. There was a recent WashingtonPost article, apparently, any employee once they quit Apple (and become ex-employee) - HR changes their title to "Associate" - this affects future job verification & prospects, and someone filed a lawsuit on this.
Hiring consultants has really gone into the toilet. Senior Data Engineers who don't know what upsert is. Senior Developers who can't answer simple questions about a stack they have "3 years experience" in. Senior AWS Architects who stumble on simple architecture questions and insist on switching an 80K qps stack to API Gateway.
I presume because the real seniors these consulting firms depended on are working for FANNG/MAMMA?
Of course all of these firms want 2 weeks of "exploration" up front...
A hiring manager friend at a Seattle unicorn once asked me to look over resumes. I didn't have a full grasp of how prevalent these "consultancies" are and was puzzled by all the jargon-filled, similar-looking resumes from people who were clearly working for "consultancies". Now I know, they were all looking for a ramp off! Some (many?) may even make great hires, but it' s hard to tease them out by looking at those resumes.
This reads like a human trafficking story, picking up cheap fresh grads and exploiting them to work way below market wages and making sure they can’t leave.
[+] [-] a4isms|4 years ago|reply
Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times."
Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others."
And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engineering."
The latter definition is the most interesting to me, it describes what "Staff" and "Principal" engineers do in most orgs. But if I had to pick a line to draw, I'd say that while a Staff or Principal spends most or all of their time working on projects that involve the human/organization issues around the engineering, a senior engineer is one who does this at least part of the time.
There are other, perfectly valid perspectives on what makes an engineer "senior," but what I like about this one that's relevant to TFA is that this kind of "seniority" is hard to fake.
[+] [-] robbyking|4 years ago|reply
Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you.
[+] [-] curun1r|4 years ago|reply
We wanted to hire a junior role since our team was already relatively senior. But the company’s salary bands were not at all competitive for entry-level developers. So we classed the new hire as senior to make it work.
Some companies’ policies are stupid and inflexible and engineers would rather just work around the problem than having to fight against HR.
[+] [-] flatiron|4 years ago|reply
Come to think of it after 20 years I kinda still feel that way.
[+] [-] alex_anglin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kolla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tom-thistime|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austincheney|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nimbius|4 years ago|reply
whenever I help hire a senior-level engine mechanic or technician for a shop, I need to know they can do the work without a lot of supervision. I also need to know theyll resolve the issues on the shop floor and be able to communicate those issues to a customer as well as a greenhorn tech straight out of a brake shop without chewing them up if its their fault. They need to have the ability to delegate things, get along with people and get the job done.
most of all, i dont need the team to see "a new senior mechanic just got hired." I need the team to see a new mechanic and form a consensus that she is senior based on their walk, not my talk. in that first year ill spend more time in the break room sucking down folgers and listening, or just walking the floor stocking ear plugs and soap dispensers and waiting to see what they do.
[+] [-] zuhayeer|4 years ago|reply
We also normalized some of the scope and responsibility definitions for software engineering levels based on what we've seen through company leveling rubrics that we collect: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
[+] [-] gjsman-1000|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodah|4 years ago|reply
Absolutely not. I was in college for CS/CE, dropped out during an economic crisis, joined the military, and had to work my way through technician, network engineer, systems engineer, DevOps, SRE, and finally I am a very senior SWE. That was over a decade long journey and has made quite an impact on how I've lived my life.
I didn't lie to get jobs or interviews, I didn't embellish. Instead I had to research what was being done with my resume, I had to work with third-party recruiters, I had to write letters to hiring managers to get interviews. The people that are the subject of this article had the privilege to go to and finish college, that is your free pass. You don't get to cheat the job market just because you think you deserve it.
If you can't tell, I'm incredibly frustrated reading this post.
Edit: I do feel for people who have a lack of opportunity. I was there, I lived it, I felt it. That said, it's certainly not the only emotion I connect with when reading this story.
[+] [-] patcon|4 years ago|reply
First, I hear ya. But I don't feel he's described his colleagues well enough for me to have your convictions. I can tell that even in reading it, I'm dropping into the roles the sorta people I grew up with. And that gives me my own sense of the slippery slope.
For some people there's no path. Military service (USA or Euro or whatever) is a great catch-all that many people use to braid their own bootstraps, and I'm happy you had it, but many people don't have that luxury. I'm not saying it wasn't brutal work and commitment, but access to the ability to DO hard work (with rewards instead of extraction) is often luxury.
Some people need to hustle more, and that usually means being scrappy. I feel for your perspective because I've been on your side, criticizing the tactics of extended family from other cultures. It didn't go well, and I've since learned that what some families need to do to survive and succeed looks very different from what I might assume is right. I don't like it; I don't do it; I don't want it to be that way; but I can't dismiss it.
Anyhow, much love
[+] [-] nicholasjarnold|4 years ago|reply
I will not specifically call out names, but the some of the largest and most well known consultancies do this as a matter of practice after they overbook themselves for projects for which they do not have staff on the bench to fill.
It's sad, but honestly the prevalence of these practices (and perhaps growth of them?) only makes the genuine among us more valuable. Those who actually posses technical talent and experience will be needed more and more by companies who get burned by the frauds. Onward and upward I guess.
[+] [-] AmericanBlarney|4 years ago|reply
Also had an incident where I interviewed one person but am pretty sure someone different showed up and was completely clueless about the most basic tasks. Within a week I think they figured out that I was onto them and made some excuse to quit about taking a contract closer to home.
Honestly, at this point many American companies have an office of their own offshore, and it's generally considered more prestigious and better condensated to work for those companies directly, so I assume there's close to zero talent left in the large outsourcers.
[+] [-] osrec|4 years ago|reply
They're hired as scapegoats, and attached to an already failed project. Then they're publically blamed for the failure, while the actual guy responsible gets away with murder (and maybe even hops into a new internal role with better pay).
If I was to rename the consulting/outsourcing industry, I would probably call it the "professional scapegoat" industry.
[+] [-] raincom|4 years ago|reply
In the end, what matters is the cheapest labor, and billable hours. Account managers are judged on how much profit they bring.
[+] [-] anononaut|4 years ago|reply
What was that "something," if you don't mind me asking?
[+] [-] g051051|4 years ago|reply
Back in the early 90's, I worked for a company that had a long term contract for software development and support in another city. The team that worked on that project would rotate up and stay in an apartment that the company maintained there. While I never worked on the project and never saw the apartment, I heard many tales about it, which indicated that it was terrible. Too small, non-functioning amenities, just an utter dive. The team that worked there would just grouse about it to other devs, but never said anything to management, because they assumed they were just being cheap.
Well, someone finally mentioned it (probably during an exit interview) and management was shocked. They had been paying top dollar for what they thought was a luxury apartment, and instead were getting ripped off. I think they wound up getting a different, better apartment for the devs.
[+] [-] trhway|4 years ago|reply
after 30+ years in the industry whenever i read things like this the Casablanca always comes first to mind.
[+] [-] uncomputation|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThalesX|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sailingparrot|4 years ago|reply
The entire theoretical CS field yes. In the practical field of CS engineering, this is only a subset of the useful competences and a small one at that. Communication, working as part of team, reliability, ability to look up and learn things you don't currently know, caring about the state of the code you write, mentoring others, being able/willing to push for things you believe can be done better (not just in terms of algorithm, but processes affecting the entire business) etc. are all as important.
I would much rather hire someone that sucks in algos/data structure, but is fairly good on all those other points than the opposite.
So yes, whiteboarding can be useful to assess how a candidate is doing on one of the specific skills that are useful for a CS engineer, but if 50% to 90% of your hiring decision is based on that, just like it is in FANGs today, you have an inadequate hiring process IMHO.
For the average SDE job. If your job is to implement and optimize a compiler, then sure it's extremely important.
[+] [-] lnenad|4 years ago|reply
It's not an easy thing to look for, I know, but it's what we should be striving towards IMHO and what I'm focusing on. So far it has had great results, with a few misses, but a better success rate than just handing out technical stuff.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago|reply
I worked in a (good) CS department for 4.5 years. They did not teach programming skills to anyone. Most (not all, but most) of the jobs you might be hired to do require far more from the programming skills area than the "computer science" area. People coming out of that program (even at the PhD level) often didn't not even understand how to use a debugger!
[+] [-] kayodelycaon|4 years ago|reply
Based on my experience, theory problems on white boards is about as useful as dropping a CUPs automation problem on unsuspecting interviewees.
Build me a CUPs driver that drops pdf into in folder in 15 minutes or less. Without documentation.
Bonus points if you can ask if you can skip that bullshit and install and configure an existing a package.
Note: I'm a senior developer with at least a decade of experience. I don't just slap two libraries together. If you want to have fun, dig into how macOS sandboxes CUPs. My bash scripts were not happy.
[+] [-] hnfong|4 years ago|reply
That said, I do understand why people complain about algorithm questions -- it's undeniably a good filter if you have a large pool of candidates (and a reasonable predictor of ability), but it's mostly irrelevant to most software jobs today since you can usually import textbook algorithms as OSS modules.
The "correct" but harder way to interview is to tailor the interview questions to your actual requirements. This is much more involved and it requires the interviewers to divert attention from whatever they're working on just to set the problems. Setting a problem that's at the right difficulty level and evaluates the right set of skills precisely tailored to the team's needs is hard. (I don't think most typical software engineers have the chops to do this, even experienced senior ones.)
So it's kinda understandable that everyone just randomly picks something from leetcode and use that instead. It's probably not so much a failure of the software industry on the recruiting side, but more of a symptom of how we have failed to come up with skills, tricks, standards and practices that everyone actually agrees on. (eg. it's mostly fruitless to determine whether a candidate is hire-worthy with a question like "would you use Javascript to implement a backend system?") At least the algorithm questions are objectively agreed to be true (even if possibly irrelevant) by everyone and is actually part of most CS cirricula...
[+] [-] notapenny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digisign|4 years ago|reply
It shows you've solved a similar problem recently and have gonads of steel, with a bit of overlap of how good an employee you'll be.
A short test contract after a bit of legwork is far more revealing imho.
[+] [-] lkrubner|4 years ago|reply
Even then it was clear that there was a lot of "belt inflation" happening. The karate schools like the children to feel like they are making progress, so every 6 months the children got a new belt, until finally they were black belts.
It seems like the same thing has been happening with engineering titles.
[+] [-] mrexroad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ok_dad|4 years ago|reply
Karate is Japanese, but I get your point.
[+] [-] softwaredoug|4 years ago|reply
Senior is the new “mid level” dev
Dev is the new “junior” dev
Especially in times when managers want to retain their best, they often can’t get HR to budge on salaries. So they promote them to get them into a competitive salary range.
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simmanian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
Honestly, I don't even fault them for it. The author seemed a bit naive about the situation he was getting into, and he left, which is fair. Ultimately this whole thing is just a symptom of a broken immigration and hiring system. If an embellished resume can fool an entire big tech interview panel and the candidate actually does good work for them moving forward, who should take the blame for it?
[+] [-] tgflynn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haidev|4 years ago|reply
That's without bringing the number of recruiters that wants you to pay them a weekly fee and "guarantee" you a job in X number of weeks.
I'll end with one funny recruiter that reached out two weeks ago from a similar recruiting firm. I made it clear from the beginning that I will NEVER lie on my resume neither allow them to edit my resume. He offers me this job that he found for me. I started asking about the compensation and he says 18$/hour, I laughed and said that this rate won't work for me especially in the Bay Area. He said he'll circle back with his manager and try to get me 65K/year like I asked which I believe is fair for someone fresh off school like me, I am not chasing after a FAANG salary especially being a recent grad. Anyways long story short, he calls me back and offers me $20/hour without any benefits this time. I just humbly declined and politely asked him to not reach me again.
The market seems to be hot for Senior developers, which leaves recent grads struggling to find jobs especially in a remote setting. I'm grateful that I am like OP where I can fall back on my parents and keep looking for a job neither do I need sponsorship.
[+] [-] manuelabeledo|4 years ago|reply
I was desperately looking for a job, and these consulting firms are a dime a dozen. So there I went, fresh off uni, interview with a medium sized consulting firm from Mexico.
First day, one of the managers bragged about putting half dozen engineers in a motel, at walking distance from the customer offices, three per room, only things they did were work, eat and sleep, for six straight months.
Knowing no better and in dire need of money, I took the job.
Six months in, and after several weeks working 60 hours, I quit the day after I had a heat stroke because they moved us in a new office space with no windows or A/C.
I learnt afterwards that they were charging the customer 4x the rate they were paying me. Of course, they had "sold" me as a "senior developer".
[+] [-] rmk|4 years ago|reply
Once a company sponsors an employee for a Green Card application, it has every incentive in the world to exploit and mistreat the employee. And many companies routinely act on the incentives.
It's unfortunate that a lot of the mass focus is on illegal immigrants, who have less of a legal standing and moral case than those who have followed the laws of their host country to the letter, but still find themselves treated like dirt. This is one of the unfortunate byproducts of electoral politics and representative democracy: sometimes, there are groups that are unlikely to matter electorally given their numbers, and their concerns are always given short shrift no matter how legitimate.
Of course, the H-1B system itself has done enormous damage to the industry by enabling companies such as IBM to mass fire entire cohorts of older people. As usual, efforts at reform have been fitful, uneven, and have been subject to the vagaries of the political winds.
[+] [-] user_7832|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RMPR|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrackerFF|4 years ago|reply
We also had very cheap company housing, and a lot of other perks.
[+] [-] vjust|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ensorceled|4 years ago|reply
I presume because the real seniors these consulting firms depended on are working for FANNG/MAMMA?
Of course all of these firms want 2 weeks of "exploration" up front...
[+] [-] barrenko|4 years ago|reply
(Semi-joke)
[+] [-] stefanba3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwdv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a4isms|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa