I've been on the other side of the table recently, and I agree it feels like a buyer's market. But it still took a while to find good candidates, and a lot of candidates showed up to interviews weirdly unprepared on even the basics.
If it's a drought for you, then I'd have to add: It seems like an especially weird drought, as well. Supply and demand seem to be doing odd things.
(And, for the spectators of this comment thread, I can confirm: Yes, 2 people with 3 anecdotes each is enough to speculate wildly about an entire industry.)
It’s hard to extrapolate to the whole market, but I can provide my personal experience. I was laid off, and my unemployment benefits have stopped, so finding a job is a bit more desperate for me than it has been in the past.
Now I’m dealing with algorithms technical interviews, but they don’t mesh well with my style of problem solving at all. I like to quietly think on a problem by myself first. If it’s an exceptionally difficult problem, I’ll probably take a walk or the answer might come to me in the shower. If I’m working with someone else, a more collaborative process where we’re both trying to solve the problem and bouncing ideas back-and-fort is my style. Solving the problem in 30 minutes in front of a judge under the context of needing to land a job as soon as possible doesn’t properly test my abilities as a software engineer at all.
Yesterday, I was asked a leetcode hard in an interview from some no name start up. I answered how to theoretically solve it out loud with the interviewer but ran out of time implementing it. I got the impression the interviewer thought I was unprepared and a clueless engineer. I was rejected 15 minutes after the interview.
Overall, I’m not encountering interviews that actually let me display my competency. The interviews seem to all be tailored for a specific type of problem solver (fast in high-pressure test-taking environments) while eliminating every other type of person. I think it’s easy for the interviewer to lose context on the nerves the candidate might be experiencing.
The accounting industry doesn’t do this. If someone has a CPA license, companies trust that credential. If someone doesn’t have a CPA but has experience in Big 4 public accounting, companies trust that experience. If someone lacks those signals, companies may ask more technical questions. But they start from a basis of trust based on clear signals.
Unlike my accounting background where my past experience was based on trust, I have open source projects that can actually be reviewed. Some reviewers have gone through them yet still want to perform an algorithmic interview. Most have not. I feel that the vast majority of interviewers don’t really know how to interview in a more holistic manner.
If you've done a fair amount of leetcode problems you can recognize them and feel their levels. Then afterwards you can search and confirm your expectations.
It is not uncommon to have either verbatim or lightly modified leetcode problems as technical challenges for interviews. I think Facebook now makes it standard you need to be able to solve 2 leetcode medium questions in a 45 minute interview.
It was a difficult problem, and I was genuinely interested in the solution. So I searched online after the interview and found that leetcode called it a hard problem.
Wow, so that problem was from the LeetCode website itself?
Was it with different parameters or different phrasing, ... Or everything was the same?
If same but different, I wonder how (un)likely it is that they came up with that problem themselves, independently, without knowing about the LeetCode version. (What would you think?)
I'm not sure on the root cause. Like I said, there's several people that I know who are all experiencing the same things. I have 20 years experience and a phd. Others in my friend group have no degree whatsoever, but have a decade of experience. Several years ago, we were all offered multiple jobs at a time. Now, we are not even getting requests for interviews.
EDIT: adding that, because we all live in a non-metropolitan area, we all have been remote, and are continuing to look for remote work.
I think fully remote expectation in non-metro areas can be a big hurdle. I know many startups here in SF who are looking to hire good candidates. But they want in-office presence at least a few days a week.
Someone summed it up nicely for me - remote work gives you speed. Colocation (typically office) gives you velocity. A startup needs velocity.
With modern teleconferencing tools, it doesn't matter.
If you feel that in-person time is important, then do what we did at my current company: They hired me. I know everyone at the local state university, from professors to students. We hired from that pool. Everyone is still remote, but our local group gets together once a week for lunch. For $100-$150 a week (yes, it really is that cheap in this area), the company maintains a culture and personal interaction for a team of talented programmers (from me, who has a PhD and two decades of experience, down to the best students who just graduated, and others in-between) without the cost of maintaining an office.
We all work on different projects in the company.
Velocity happens with communication. Communication doesn't need to be in-person, but it does need to be real time. So use Teams, Zoom, Hangouts, or whatever. We have the tools for this already.
Final note: The company didn't intend to have half a dozen people in the same city, they just intended to hire me. It just so happens that I'm really good at finding talent in the places that everyone else is ignoring.
> With modern teleconferencing tools, it doesn't matter.
Speak for yourself? I personally find Zoom to be extremely lacking. No eye contact, no body language, people having problems with wifi or other device issues, no serendipitous chats around hallways or watercoolers etc all affect the quality of communication.
As I said, founders and CEOs are already voting with their choices. Most of the big companies have already embraced RTO. A majority of the new startups I am seeing insist on at least few days in office. There are a few which are fully remote but they seem to be a minority.
That is the key. By looking for a remote role you are competing with large pool of workers.
Are you ready to accept a new role as a contractor with 100k USD annual salary and no benefits? How about 60k? Many skilled developers will accept such offer for remote role.
Young people in the CS field consider any time period in which they aren't being actively headhunted and constantly presented with multiple offers from multiple companies to be a drought. r/cscareerquestions/ over on reddit is full of doom and gloom from new grads being unable to find jobs as software engineers at big tech companies.
There is definitely a down turn, because before you didn't need to be a good candidate, whereas now only good candidates are getting the interviews and ultimately the jobs but historically it still seems better than the downturns in 03 and 09.
What I can say is that the interview process recently has become so impersonal and kind of automated even for highly skilled positions.
I have commented on this before but if someone is applying for Senior or above, seeing them live code a random algo with weird requirements seems less valuable to me than actually discussing architecture, previous projects and personality.
Even talking through a small project (with 0 code involved) would tell me so much about someone than what I've experienced in the last year or so while looking for a job.
So, in my opinion companies are what became weird. I don't know but even the smallest startup seems to feel they need to have their hiring pipeline be like Google or something.
10-15 years ago, I would just meet a manager and someone in the engineering team, have 1 hour chat with them and instantly know whether I'm hired or not. Now it's 4 interviews from the CEO to the HR and their grandmas.
> The IEEE has been riding this horse for a very long time
Well, there's your mistake right there. You're supposed to be riding an ox.
All this talk of oxen and horses got me curious about the PDF, so I went and took a look. It's really far worse than you've described.
I couldn't stomach it for too long, but here's some highlights:
(1) The first ~65 pages are about "requirements gathering." Page 60 offers up this gem of insight:
Priority = ((Value * (1 - Risk)) / Cost
(2) The next hundreds of pages go through topics in sequence, like "Architecture" and "Design" (who knew they were different?). Naturally, "Security" is slapped on several hundred pages later.
I couldn't make it through the whole PDF, in all honesty. But I'm quite certain the soul of software engineering is nowhere to be found in there; they've eliminated it entirely and replaced it with stamp-collecting and checklists.
> I would rather be a poor entrepreneur/freelancer than wealthy salaried employee. And office isn't really the factor, but other things, like freedom.
To add a data point that will sound snarkier than it is:
I used to say very similar things. It is a really wonderful sound bite, and you can get together with all the other starving founders to say things like this to each other.
Looking back on it, I think this philosophy is actually a really important part of the startup-industrial complex. If you can just make it "not cool" to go get a job, and starting a startup is all about "freedom and adventure," then it becomes really easy for VCs to normalize things like "founders paying themselves subsistence salaries." That means the pipeline of new startups will increase in quantity and decrease in unit-cost -- which is exactly what the VCs want.
What they won't tell you about, if you want to chase the founder dream, is the opportunity cost. It turns out that maxing out your 401(k) is pretty great, as is having an infinite supply of sparkling water and spending your days building software with a whole bunch of other brilliant people.
I'm still not going to RTO, though. That part is just dumb, and I think every serious company that truly values engineering productivity will agree.
The "outliers" are the companies paying these insultingly low salaries for technology development. That's why there's so much low-quality software in the world.
FAANG (and a few FAANG-adjacent) companies are the only ones paying close to decent wages, and even they've been making frankly egregious cuts to their protein-bar budgets lately.
Let's not sit around manufacturing skewed datasets that give people the wrong idea about what software engineers should get paid.
While I agree that FAANG data should be present/available, I will say that the only reason those companies are able to pay such amounts are due to their outsized valuations and the market shares they have captured. Vast majority of companies do not bring in per-employee revenues on par with the FAANGs, so it's not realistic to set one's definition of "decent wages" at those numbers and expect everyone else to pay them. Lots of high-flying startups made a play for fast growth and paid similarly high comp, with the end result of laying huge numbers of people off when the market demanded accountability.
TL;DR: I love being an engineer in the Bay Area, but we truly are a bubble.
> I don't think the author is sympathetic to autistic people
I think it's actually the exact opposite.
This reads to me like a very kind sentence. It can be very helpful to spell things out like this for such an audience. It is clear, simple, and direct.
I'll also note the sentence doesn't contain any sort of added emotions or judgment. (For example, the author could have made it worse by saying "If you decide to engage in" rather than "If you engage in," as it's currently written.)
So it really is just a straightforward statement about things that are usually never discussed at all. And, even better for this audience, the information is provided plainly, in a safe setting, with time and space to process things.
Nothing magical; just front and back of the midpoint between the eyebrows until you settle on a point where you get the sensation. That is why i called it a "physiological trick".
Yes, but not fully cross-eyed, there should be no strain, you are focusing on a point within the "blackness" when your eyes are closed. Start with the midpoint between the eyebrows and keep your whole focus/attention on it and nothing else i.e. let go of everything with no other thoughts. Slowly move the focal point back and forth until you literally feel a jolt/dropping sensation.
To me focus means to not move the eyes but to bring the attention in that area and be aware of the sensations there. For example, just bring your attention on your left foot big toe at this moment and suddenly you are now aware of your big toe which was not in your awareness otherwise. Just keep your awareness here and you're focusing on it.
There is a important point to be made here; viz. The physical activity leads the mental focus/attention. In your example, flexing and relaxing the left foot big toe makes it far easier to bring the focus initially on to the activity/sensation at that point and then expanding it to overall awareness.
In the exercise i mentioned, you physically focus the eyes at a point in the blackness and the mental focus/attention follows it simultaneously.
I wonder how the somatotopic map relates to proprioceptive awareness. I've kind of implicitly assumed that executive functions like the attentional spotlight rely on connecting to that area to accomplish conscious proprioception, does that book go over how it relates?
You will have to read the book to find what you are specifically looking for.
The basic idea is that the space around your body to the maximum distance reachable by your arms/legs called "peripersonal space" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Graziano#Peripersonal_...) is integrated into a larger body schema maintained (partially) in the somatotopic map and its homunculi. Proprioception is part but not whole of it and how it might be regulated by higher executive functions like focus/attention is AFAIK not clear.
"When art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. When painters get together, they talk about where to get the best turpentine." (Picasso, supposedly [1])
To be generous to OP, I think their point is about how to communicate in an elevator pitch, or a resume bullet point, or the first few minutes of an intro call. And in those contexts, OP is pretty reasonably correct.
What it comes down to is details.
The person citing numbers about growth, hiring, or whatever is proving they know the details of the work. And that's a great start.
The next step for the interviewer comes in following up to find out whether they actually know the details of how the work was done, why it was done that way, what was good or bad about how the work was done, and why it's good or bad.
A good follow-up question would be something like: "Great, please walk me through the story of how you took ${METRIC} from A to B, what you think went well, and what you think went poorly." That should yield a solid 10-15 minute (or more) discussion where the executive candidate can prove they have the ability to handle both minute details and grand strategy at the same time, as well as the discretion to know when they're supposed to be doing which one.
Failure to do this on the part of the interviewer is how a company ends up with so many sub-par executives. And a failure on the part of the executive to push themselves in this way, in the first place, is how our industry has ended up with so many sub-par executives.
Love this comment. Saw over and over again at Google that a lot of people can learn the latest correct thing to say, get a job, and coast on a trillion dollar behemoths standard growth mechanics. (case in point: me)
There's always that tension, but IMHO I watched it tip over into something ugly over 7 years from 2016 - 2023
> My female friend once experimented by putting up a picture of a shoe as her only dating profile. She still received many likes - some of them paid Super Likes.
Well, obviously. Every guy wants a woman who's got some depth to her sole.
There's also several more classes of B.S., for what it's worth.
An exaggerated/anonymized version of a recent one I got, from an otherwise-really-strong senior engineer: "Of course when I said we would put a button there, it also meant we MUST build an entire UI framework from scratch, with full test coverage for the entire thing!"
...actually, that's not even that exaggerated. Shipping software at big companies can be unreasonably difficult, sometimes.
Yea, I've had the privilege of working with a few _excellent_ project managers (or Producers as they're called in gaming) and they work literal magic.
I've studied project management, I've managed projects and lead teams, but holy crap those people are on a whole other level with how well they gather and disseminate information and communicate it effectively.
None of them could code themselves out of a wet paper bag, but that's not the skill they get hired for.
I can't wait to buy one and finally be able to open more than 20 Chrome tabs.