inflation inflation everywhere!

[Coronita]

What would you consider a worse scenario.

1. A 2-2 condo in Mira Mesa that lists for $460k, but comes back with a counter “as-is” demanding $500k…

or

2. An entry level mobile engineer with 1 year of relevant experience, remote worker, based in “lower cost” Texas, demanding $118k/year because thats the offer he got elsewhere….and your boss and recruiter yelling at you because you balked and said no, considering 2 months ago, it only cost your budget $95k…

..it really sucks to be the person hiring these days just like it sucks to be the one trying to buy a house today…

so…im off the market for another property….and im going to try to find another job that pays 20-25% just because thats what everyone else is doing….gotta keep up with inflation

[The-Shoveler]

We seem to be losing people (quitting) at a record rate.

[sdrealtor]

Should’ve taken that engineering scholarship 40 years ago

[sdrealtor]

,

[Snick]

Worst case is this schlub extorting extra dineros because he overpaid for his house and miscalculated homeownership expenses. If its a WFH situation, why not just take the higher paying offer?

[utcsox]

[quote=Coronita]What would you consider a worse scenario.

2. An entry level mobile engineer with 1 year of relevant experience, remote worker, based in “lower cost” Texas, demanding $118k/year because thats the offer he got elsewhere….and your boss and recruiter yelling at you because you balked and said no, considering 2 months ago, it only cost your budget $95k…

..it really sucks to be the person hiring these days just like it sucks to be the one trying to buy a house today…

[/quote]

Can you explain on why it really sucks to be the person hiring these days?

[Coronita]

[quote=utcsox][quote=Coronita]What would you consider a worse scenario.

2. An entry level mobile engineer with 1 year of relevant experience, remote worker, based in “lower cost” Texas, demanding $118k/year because thats the offer he got elsewhere….and your boss and recruiter yelling at you because you balked and said no, considering 2 months ago, it only cost your budget $95k…

..it really sucks to be the person hiring these days just like it sucks to be the one trying to buy a house today…

[/quote]

Can you explain on why it really sucks to be the person hiring these days?[/quote]

Sure.. It’s basically like trying to buy a house today. Limited supply, everyone else wants to buy a house. Supply and demand driving up prices.

Similar for mobile engineers, even before pre-covid, it was already hard to find well qualified mobile engineers. It took us about 2 months to find 3 good middle level engineers. When covid hit, my company decided (stupidly, out of my control) to furlough all engineers 1 day per week. For california employees,that was great because under CA covid-19 unemployment laws, all the furloughed engineers were paid 32 hours, and then could claim unemployment on the 5th day under CA’s worksharing program, which worked out ok because engineers were paid more that day with the state AND federal lump sum UI benefit (came out to be about $1000/day)

But there were a bunch of non-CA engineers that didn’t have tje same state benefit that allowed them to qualify for state UI benefits since it was only 1 day of lost work…no state UI benefit, then no federal lump sum $600 benefit too… So, well, they quit and found a job quickly within 2-3 weeks by companies that never closed or reduced hours…

Now that we are back to full business (and more, since we have a lot of interest from old and new customers) that need our product to safely reopen, I need to staff up in addition to the engineers I lost.

Problemville: those that are good and looking for a job have 4-5 offers chasing them, and since remote-work has been proven to be a viable option, we’re competing a lot with Bay Area companies, even for the employees that traditionally are located in lower cost areas like Florida, Texas, Idaho, etc. Because most companies are offering 3 choices

1. Fully remote
2. Hybrid (X days in office, Y days remote)
3. Fully in office

just like us…

So the candidates that use to be in lower cost areas..wages has gone up considerably, since they no longer are stuck working at a company in their local area that might want to pay lower.

The funny part is my company is headquartered in FL and for the longest time has complained they don’t want to hire anyone in CA because of the much higher salaries…Well, now that some CA companies went into Florida and are offering remote opportunities at CA salaries, companies in Florida like mine are going through a painful awakening:

1. denial: “nah, that’s not happening. We can still find senior engineers for under $100k”

to

2. shock: “what do you mean a junior engineer that is asking for $115-8k has 3 offers in that range…”

to

3. depression: “we haven’t been able to fill these jobs in the past 3-6 months and it’s starting to impact our business”…

I was called into a meeting, and it started out with …”why haven’t these positions been filled”… And I bluntly said, “well originally you offered a shitty comp package. And now you’re offering something that would have been good 3-4 months ago, but now this is on the low side too. I suggested you hire new pr 1-2 year newbies to train them up… months ago, when no one else was hiring and they were looking for a job..You said you weren’t willing to do that. But now, you’ve changed your mind, but guess what? So has every other company. So you’re going to compete for well qualified new grads and those with 1-2 years experience too…”

The candidates I’m talking to are not even based in CA. These are candidates in the middle of the US…I’m not even really considering CA candidates, and when asked why, I bluntly said “because you can’t afford them…” Speaking of which, I have an interview this week…lol…

Then there was this candidate that we wanted to move into round 2 of the interview, and the way we do it do a take home assignment that the candidate can work on his free time (without the pressure/stress of a chalkboard/whiteboarding programming exercise in traditional interview)…But the candidate got all butt hurt that it took 2-3 hours, and then was upset that the earliest interview time we could give him was 4 days later….So he leaves a negative review on Glassdoor complaining about it..I was like WTF…And he wasn’t even that good and definitely not at the comp’s he wanted…

It’s a great time to be a mobile engineer with a shred of experience. You can get a lot of mileage out of it right now, probably more so than most other engineering types. When I find my next gig, all is fair if I poach my old team, lol…

There’s like a $8000 bounty for each referral at my company. I’m pretty sure other companies have similar things. If I can poach an entire team, that’s like a good $100k lol.

[svelte]

[quote=Coronita]
Then there was this candidate that we wanted to move into round 2 of the interview, and the way we do it do a take home assignment that the candidate can work on his free time (without the pressure/stress of a chalkboard/whiteboarding programming exercise in traditional interview)…But the candidate got all butt hurt that it took 2-3 hours, and then was upset that the earliest interview time we could give him was 4 days later….
[/quote]
In the past when I interviewed, if someone asked me to take a test I told them I just changed my mind and am no longer interested in their company. I still found jobs and it apparently never hurt my salary level.

I get that some companies want to ensure I have the chops I say I have, but at the same time I had no problem finding a job so I didn’t have to put up with the hassle of taking tests. Next!

[quote=Coronita]
There’s like a $8000 bounty for each referral at my company. I’m pretty sure other companies have similar things. [/quote]

From what I’ve seen, I think that is true.

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=svelte][quote=Coronita]
Then there was this candidate that we wanted to move into round 2 of the interview, and the way we do it do a take home assignment that the candidate can work on his free time (without the pressure/stress of a chalkboard/whiteboarding programming exercise in traditional interview)…But the candidate got all butt hurt that it took 2-3 hours, and then was upset that the earliest interview time we could give him was 4 days later….
[/quote]
In the past when I interviewed, if someone asked me to take a test I told them I just changed my mind and am no longer interested in their company. I still found jobs and it apparently never hurt my salary level.

I get that some companies want to ensure I have the chops I say I have, but at the same time I had no problem finding a job so I didn’t have to put up with the hassle of taking tests. Next!

[quote=Coronita]
There’s like a $8000 bounty for each referral at my company. I’m pretty sure other companies have similar things. [/quote]

From what I’ve seen, I think that is true.[/quote]

Is it unreasonable to ask to be paid for a test, refundable upon failure

[svelte]

[quote=scaredyclassic]

Is it unreasonable to ask to be paid for a test, refundable upon failure[/quote]

Not a bad idea, but I think they should be paid, period.

Reason: I’ve heard tales of companies asking candidates to solve a problem. When the candidate turned in the solution, the company was never heard from again – they had their solution and used it…in other words, they used the “take a test” guise to get free work done.

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=svelte][quote=scaredyclassic]

Is it unreasonable to ask to be paid for a test, refundable upon failure[/quote]

Not a bad idea, but I think they should be paid, period.

Reason: I’ve heard tales of companies asking candidates to solve a problem. When the candidate turned in the solution, the company was never heard from again – they had their solution and used it…in other words, they used the “take a test” guise to get free work done.[/quote]

I wonder if this is some wage law violation; could be a good class action lawsuit. The burden should be on the employer to prove it is a true, standardized test, not free work. And should be paid.

[Coronita]

Oh we don’t make the candidate do actual work. It’s basically a simple app that shouldn’t take longer than 2-3 hours. And basically, you write a simple app that loads a bunch of images from an image server like flicker or google photos using a public api, display it in a grid view, and allow you to zoom in on the image. Should be easy peasy….

Actually for our interview process, we offer a choice.

1. Take home assignment

or

2. Answer programming questions on an whiteboard in front of engineers

We don’t care which approach, and either is fine, but a lot of us wanted to offer this 1st option because a lot of us, including me don’t do well with the traditional whiteboard approach because we don’t write good code under duress and with people looking over our shoulder. And some people like me, knowing there’s the google/facebook style “grilling” interview, I don’t want spend time studying for an interview pretending I can solve these irrelevant brain teaser IQ questions that Google and similar companies love to give candidates to test their IQ than their skillset, and don’t want to be part of a system that encourages that practice. But that’s just me.

Almost all candidates choose (1)

Because a lot of candidates who otherwise would write software well but can’t do so under stress (like an 1 hour interview in front of people on a whiteboard) would rather take the same time at home in the comfort of their own place. And since it’s open book, open internet, open anything, we encourage people to be resourceful as if they were on the job and didn’t know how to do something to look it up themselves. We don’t care, as long as they are honest about it, and during the panel interview we ask questions about why they did certain things, and made certain decisions, or how does a piece of code they (might have) copied and pasted works…Because that’s what people these day do anyway….As long as you know what it does, doesn’t really matter if you wrote it from scratch or not.

And there’s been studies that the old style of technical interview does not really work well.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200714101228.htm

“Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills”

“Technical interviews are feared and hated in the industry, and it turns out that these interview techniques may also be hurting the industry’s ability to find and hire skilled software engineers,” says Chris Parnin, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper on the work. “Our study suggests that a lot of well-qualified job candidates are being eliminated because they’re not used to working on a whiteboard in front of an audience.”

Technical interviews in the software engineering sector generally take the form of giving a job candidate a problem to solve, then requiring the candidate to write out a solution in code on a whiteboard — explaining each step of the process to an interviewer.

Previous research found that many developers in the software engineering community felt the technical interview process was deeply flawed. So the researchers decided to run a study aimed at assessing the effect of the interview process on aspiring software engineers.

For this study, researchers conducted technical interviews of 48 computer science undergraduates and graduate students. Half of the study participants were given a conventional technical interview, with an interviewer looking on. The other half of the participants were asked to solve their problem on a whiteboard in a private room. The private interviews did not require study participants to explain their solutions aloud, and had no interviewers looking over their shoulders.

Researchers measured each study participant’s interview performance by assessing the accuracy and efficiency of each solution. In other words, they wanted to know whether the code they wrote would work, and the amount of computing resources needed to run it.

“People who took the traditional interview performed half as well as people that were able to interview in private,” Parnin says. “In short, the findings suggest that companies are missing out on really good programmers because those programmers aren’t good at writing on a whiteboard and explaining their work out loud while coding.”

Also, interesting note:

The researchers also note that the current format of technical interviews may also be used to exclude certain job candidates.

“For example, interviewers may give easier problems to candidates they prefer,” Parnin says. “But the format may also serve as a barrier to entire classes of candidates. For example, in our study, all of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed. Our study was limited, and a larger sample size would be needed to draw firm conclusions, but the idea that the very design of the interview process may effectively exclude an entire class of job candidates is troubling.”

What’s more, the specific nature of the technical interview process means that many job candidates try to spend weeks or months training specifically for the technical interview, rather than for the actual job they’d be doing.

“The technical interview process gives people with industry connections an advantage,” says Mahnaz Behroozi, first author of study and a Ph.D. student at NC State. “But it gives a particularly large advantage to people who can afford to take the time to focus solely on preparing for an interview process that has very little to do with the nature of the work itself.

“And the problems this study highlights are in addition to a suite of other problems associated with the hiring process in the tech sector, which we presented at ICSE-SES [the International Conference on Software Engineering, Software Engineering In Society],” adds Behroozi. “If the tech sector can address all of these challenges in a meaningful way, it will make significant progress in becoming more fair and inclusive. More to the point, the sector will be drawing from a larger and more diverse talent pool, which would contribute to better work.”

[an]

[quote=Coronita]
Actually for our interview process, we offer a choice.

1. Take home assignment

or

2. Answer programming questions on an whiteboard in front of engineers[/quote]
I only do #2. It’s not so much about actually solving the problem, which is quite easy and you should be able to do it w/in 15 minutes, but more about how you communicate your solution, thought process, and how about conduct yourself when you’re stuck. You’d be surprise at how many time I get people who say they have 10-15 years of experience who can’t reverse a string. Then I also have some people who reach for the most complex solution for the simplest problem (using recursion to reverse a string).

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=an][quote=Coronita]
Actually for our interview process, we offer a choice.

1. Take home assignment

or

2. Answer programming questions on an whiteboard in front of engineers[/quote]
You’d be surprise at how many time I get people who say they have 10-15 years of experience who can’t reverse a string. [/quote]

I don’t find that surprising. I can’t say in my 35 years of working as a programmer I’ve ever had to reverse a string.

While I don’t know the details of the questions an asks or the tests Coronita sends home, I’d point out that in general tests and their questions turn out to be horrible predictors of programmer ability. Personally, I try to go with interview questions like, “Tell me about the toughest bug you ever had to solve? How did you go about solving it?” or, “What was the biggest challenge you faced working at your last job?” or “Of all the people you’ve worked with who was the person you learned the most from, and what did you learn?”

If I want to know about thought processes I often simply ask, “When asked to implement a new feature, what process do you like to follow?” (And btw, that last question is a trick question. The candidate who answers with the importance of fully designing before beginning to code is someone who likes to overdesign their stuff.)

Lastly, I like to see if a candidate can tell me a story, or a step by step procedure. They might have already told me a story with my earlier questions. And the reason that I think that’s important is that despite all the people that say “programming is math” I’ve found it is more like writing a novel. You have a story (what the program does) you have characters (objects in code) that must interact (ahh, the code that binds it all together) and good code is a process of constant editing, editing and more editing.

The bottom line to me isn’t whether the candidate has the ability to do some simple coding, (or more often than not, if they’ve reviewed a bunch of questions on sites that list the questions likely found on a programming exam) the question is can they contribute to a project with thousands of lines of code without creating a tangled mess. So, I try to focus my questions on figuring out how they’ll do with that.

Just my two cents though…

[Coronita]

[quote=an][quote=Coronita]
Actually for our interview process, we offer a choice.

1. Take home assignment

or

2. Answer programming questions on an whiteboard in front of engineers[/quote]
I only do #2. It’s not so much about actually solving the problem, which is quite easy and you should be able to do it w/in 15 minutes, but more about how you communicate your solution, thought process, and how about conduct yourself when you’re stuck. You’d be surprise at how many time I get people who say they have 10-15 years of experience who can’t reverse a string. Then I also have some people who reach for the most complex solution for the simplest problem (using recursion to reverse a string).[/quote]

The FizzBuzz problem use to be a common test. It too is flawed.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/12/solving-fizzbuzz-shows-interviewers-much-more-than-your-programming-skills/?sh=7bf446a53b36

[Author]

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