Unlikely, unless the problem is relatively easy You also have to be careful with your definition of "correct". For the most part, correct simply means understanding some of the main insights to a problem with a rough pseudocode, even if in reality some edges cases are broken. Before the rise of things like coderpad, these problems were done on a whiteboard
Is the situation really this bad?
- Thread starter neverminder
- Start date
Unlikely, unless the problem is relatively easy You also have to be careful with your definition of "correct". For the most part, correct simply means understanding some of the main insights to a problem with a rough pseudocode, even if in reality some edges cases are broken. Before the rise of things like coderpad, these problems were done on a whiteboard
Man of Honour
Companies don't have as much money, so that new website/feature/app/whatever is either going to:
Not get built
Get built cheaper
Get built later
- Joined
- 24 Apr 2013
- Posts
- 106
Indeed. Which is why devs who have comfortable runway whenever economic downturn hits, just wait it out and those who don't are screwed. The problem in the past few years is unprecedented though, because of several big subsequent hits in a short period of time. I was made redundant during the whole initial Corona hysteria and again half a year ago. So what would have been a decent runway under normal circumstances in the years BC (Before Corona), just evaporated.
Man of Honour
We only hire devs in emerging markets like Eastern and Southern Europe because they are cheap there.
Senior, customer facing people and people who lead engagements we largely get from Switzerland, Germany, Austria.
Senior, customer facing people and people who lead engagements we largely get from Switzerland, Germany, Austria.
- Joined
- 24 Apr 2013
- Posts
- 106
What should be the meaning of this Indeed link? That there are a lot of Java job ads? Yeah, I use Google job aggregator which vacuums up the postings from literally all job boards. I apply to some 20 jobs every day for months now. No dice. The recruiters keep spamming the job boards with new ads as if it was business as usual, but I suspect those are either fake or they get flooded with hundreds of applications for every position.
no, you just repeatedly don't understand the purpose and are continuing to make inane comments like "university degree tests unrelated to there day to day job".
I'm sorry if you have been reject from this style of interviewing but you shoudln't let your personal experience cloud the purpose and value of these kinds of interviews which your clearly don't understand. Big Tech companies spend tens of millions on analysing optimal interviewing processes and have data from hundreds of thousands of candidates and know very well the predictive power of these problems. The stats clearly show the probability of successful outcomes form candidates who do well at these kinds of problems.
I think the reason you don't see the value is you are very focused on specific technology, libraries, tools, languages and situational problems rather than the power of someone who is very bright, very good at solving challenging problems with innate insights, can clearly communicate on the spot etc. are far more important than specifics of a particular job. Software development tools, languages and est practices tend to change every week, but the core skills of strong developers are universal.
I also think these problems are far more grounded in daily actives than the interview processes used in other industries . I did the P^G once, it is basically a straight up IQ test and if you are not in the top 2.5% (130) then you are rejected outright. That was for a Product Management role.
There is a big difference between not finding work because there are no jobs and not finding work because your resume is rejected. Your post talked about reasons why there are no jobs, now you are admitting there are lots of jobs but you have not succeeded in getting an offer.
IN my areas, there is still a shortage of good software engineers, but we are looking in areas of Big Data and data engineer etc.
Something to note, you say you are senior, but despite the quips from some junior people on the previous page, tech companies are tending to lay off more senior than junior people. Senior developers cost much more and a good senior engineer can take on more responsibility and if they are effective team leads help mange a small team highly motivated junior engineers. You might have hit an age and experience level where most companies don't want to pay for your experience. The traditional career path would be to move in to management. Otherwise staying within dev then moving more to say an R&D positon where experrience is nore valued. Also look at start-ups. Many of my friends run their own start-up and they are often hiring 45+ year old engineers who are happy to get a big pay ct in exchnage for stock options and the ability to have a big impact in a small company.
Our company had a round of layoffs last year and it was the senior people that got axed - The worst performing of the senior grade. Why pay 200K for someone who does little better than the 120K a year fresh grad. We have a few job openings in our team but were told to budget for junior hires
- Joined
- 24 Apr 2013
- Posts
- 106
I'm not admitting there are "lots of jobs". I just said there are plenty of job ads, that's a different thing. A lot of job ads are different recruitment agencies advertising the same position. Some job ads are straight up fake. A lot of them keep being reposted automatically when the position has long expired. And so on. Signal to noise ratio on job boards is extremely poor and every legit job ad gets absolutely mobbed with applications.
120K for a fresh grad? Surely that's not in UK? I'm not targeting sky high compensation, especially right now. I'm applying to mid to senior jobs offering £75-100K in London. I think that's more than reasonable.
Last edited:
He's based in the US now so it will be USD.
On the flipside the absence of big companies means the huge scale layoffs (10k+ people at a time) we've seen in the US over the last year have less impact. If you are based on the west coast of America you wake up one day and suddenly there are hundreds of new people competing for the same jobs as you. In the UK you might see the slow down in new jobs but it's not typically accompanied by huge increases in competition.
Soldato
I'm sorry but why did you assume I have failed such tests?
I have not. I've passed many of them and done it via whiteboard or leetcode style tests.
I have said why I don't value them as just because you are good at it doesn't mean you are bright and good at your job.
Far from it. I've worked with many who aced these tests yet struggle in the real world scenario.
Also many of these tests you don't show good communication as you simply do these tests in your own time and submit the results...
How's that showing good communication. Infact you just **** /shot yourself in the foot with that one as it does the complete opposite of seeing how you communicate with others.
Face to face interviews where you ask them to explain and solve a typical real life situation is far far better than a leetcode test
Soldato
I much preferred these, design a system whiteboard type situations too than the leet code style, but can't say which works better as I side-tracked away for the moment. I do however miss the fact that half of the interviews just wanted me to code a Fibonacci solution, as that was super popular and I could rattle it off without a thought.
Thhere are always some counter examples, no interview process is perfect, but the reasons people might not do well in their job are extremely varied and a lot of it is simply the work environment . Don't let personal anecdotes create a false sense of data. The fact is, statistically these kinds of interview questions are extremely powerful predictors performance.
The pure IQ tests and things yes, but the coding tests are never done in your own time. that is the whole point because otherwise you would just copy and paste an answer, so again it sounds like you don't really know what the goal of these kinds of tests are.
ehh, these tests are done face to face, albeit usually virtually now unless you are hiring close to an office.
You are also completely failing to acknowledge that problems like leetcode tests are only part of an interview process, as was pointed out to you several times. Having a systems architecture interview could be part of the process, but A) such an interview is only relevant to more senior roles, and only in some domains, B) There are plenty of people that can talk the talk but can't walk the walk so any interview based upon purely describing some system is a weak predictor that has risks. Nothing beats getting someone to actually code , you can split the wheat form the chaff and find out those that cannot only communicate well but can provably put pen to paper and show results.
why choose 1 or the other, most places will ask both kinds of questions. As mentioned above, system design questions are easy to fake if you are confident so you get lots of people who do well in the abstract but don't actually have the ability to put it in practice. An even bigger risk is the subjectivity and biases that can occur. One of the strengths of a pure coding problem is it is much more objective, so this tends to make them desirable as an initial filter for large organisations interviewing thousands of candidates.
I don't doubt at all that the situation is not as great as it was a year ago, but during the pandemic is was crazy with massive land grab for software engineers naming their own title and adding extra digits to their paycheck.
If you want to view genuine positions then go straight to the companies HR page, and sign up for alerts. Also, polish your linkedin, join premium and set your status to open for jobs, you should get plenty of requests.
I still stand by what I said that being a senior engineer is now putting you at a disadvantage. Good companies still understand the advantage, but at the same time they need far less senior than junior developers. Unfortunately there is a demographic shift so there are now far more senior developers around so the supply-demand is not as much in your favor than if you had say 2-4 years experience.
120K USD or CHF + bonuses. We hire in the UK but I am not sure on salaries. Looks like median is about $146K TC, https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/senior/locations/london-gbr , so for bigger tech companies but not FAANG you are at 200K TC, e.g. looking at 75th percentile. That is why senior developers were heavily targeted in recent layoffs.
Looking at it, the more senior/experience you have. The more likely you are going to get binned off or looked over for hiring.
Yeah, hire juniors because its cheaper for the company and you get more out of them. Just like outsourcing a team to India, instead of keeping them in the UK.
Yeah, hire juniors because its cheaper for the company and you get more out of them. Just like outsourcing a team to India, instead of keeping them in the UK.
- Joined
- 24 Apr 2013
- Posts
- 106
So then how come over 90% of the job ads have "senior" in their job titles?
Soldato
So they can give you a nice job title instead of a decent wage. Also to attract more experienced people to look at the ad in case they can hook someone desperate enough for a job to take a cut from what they were worth somewhere else.
Feel free to call me cynical. I won't be offended.
Soldato
I didn't say I'd choose one or the other
I'm no longer a full on dev, and haven't been for a while, I prefer Infra/Devops, hence why I miss being able to rattle of standard fibonnaci problem sets as I wouldn't have a chance in leet code scenarios. I simply wasn't good enough past a certain level
Soldato
Im ok with face to face tests.
my argument was always about leetcode style tests you do in your own time that does not reflect the day to day job at hand.
I was once asked to whiteboard infront of 5 people on how i would code/psudo code a simple elevator. i quite enjoyed that lol and i nailed it.
I have had similar interviews where they ask to come up with a solutiion right infront of people